Even if your development team isn't using agile practices, you can benefit by applying agile practices to quality assurance and testing.
Work closely with business experts, a.k.a. customers or customer proxies, in the early stages of the project.
Help business experts visualize the final product; write acceptance tests and requirements accordingly.
Have the business experts define what quality is for the software being produced.
Attend system design meetings and help the programmers stay focused on the immediate needs of the customers.
Use the test-automation practices outlined in Chapters 16 25. They aren't just for XP projects.
Use XP practices such as pair testing and refactoring to produce and maintain effective tests.
Work with programmers to test components as soon as the components are ready. Don't wait and test at the tail end of the project.
Be a change agent; work to get your team to implement practices such as unit testing.
Involve the business experts in acceptance testing.
Hold a retrospective to review what worked and what didn't and select areas for improvement in the next release.
