Software the Agile Way....

● They are self-organizing rather than role- or title-based. ● They are empowered to make decisions. ● They truly believe that as a team they can solve any problem. ● They are committed to team success vs. success at any cost. ● The team owns its decisions and commitments. ● Trust, vs. fear or anger, motivates them. ● They are consensus-driven, with full divergence and then convergence. ' ● And they live in a world of constant constructive disagreement. —the characteristics of high collaboration and, thus, high performance (adapted from Tabaka 2006): 

A tester on an Agile team should not just be doing testing after implementation, but should be actively involved all the way through development.  They can spot testability problems and other gaps from the very beginning, help the developers design the implementation with testability in mind, and define the tests before and during development to help the developers hit the right target.  As this is the case, the tester really needs to understand the whole story, not just the testing aspects. Quality is the responsibility of an Agile team, not any one individual. Offloading quality tasks to Tester people is a handoff that decreases the responsibility as well as the agility of the team.  Offloading will not increase quality in the long run nearly as much has collaborating. These people should be integrated, which means they need to collaborate with the rest of the team on quality tasks as well as collaborate with the team on other tasks (including story pointing). ...