Elisabeth Hendrickson has a great post about the practicalities of agile testing where she takes Brian Marick's breakdown of testing vectors and talks about what to actually do differently to achieve agility in testing.

Agile project teams generally reject the notion that they need an independent group to assess their work products or enforce their process. They value the information that testing provides and they value testing activities highly. Indeed, Extreme Programming (XP) teams value testing so much, they practice Test-Driven Development (TDD), writing and executing test code before writing the production code to pass the tests.  However, even though agile teams value testing, they don't always value testers. And they're particularly allergic to the auditing or policing aspects of heavyweight, formal QA.

So how can testers make themselves useful on a team that does not see much use in traditional, formal QA methodologies? Here's what I've been doing.

[via Elisabeth Hendrickson]