Testers in Agile?

I recently saw a shop which was "agile", yet it didn't have any testers. It was 3 developers, 1 Analyst and a ScrumMaster. The developers did TDD and created a ruby/cucumber framework to automate the GUI testing layer. Being a tester I was quite shocked by this arrangement. Agile is a test-driven approach. How could you claim to be "agile" yet have not testers?

What shocked me most was their reason why they had no testers: "The Agile Manifesto said so". Huh? Did I miss the line in the Agile Manifesto which states that we value "people who know nothing about testing over professional testers"? What they meant to say was that there are 12 Principles behind the Agile Manifesto. The ones they keyed in on were:

Business people and developers must work

together daily throughout the project.

Agile processes promote sustainable development.

The sponsors, developers, and users should be able

to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

It says nothing about the role of testers. In fact, if you read through the Manifesto and its Principles, there is nothing, NOTHING, about testing. This particular group was trying to be as "pure" agile as they thought they could. And since there was no mention of testers in the Principles, they had none. To their credit defects were down significantly from their waterfall days and releases were going in monthly and were significantly more smooth than before (they used to be on a 4X/year schedule that always turned into a 3X/year schedule because there was so much clean-up from each release).

This really got me thinking. Was testing a soon-to-be-extinct career along with Project Managers? 

Fortunately my career concern was short lived as this testerless groups velocity had peaked and was now on the rapid decline. When analyzed, the reason for this was ever-increasing re-work due to defects and Testing Technical debt (Quadrant 4 tests, for example, were not being executed). Having some new agile coaches they began to realize testing was a full-time effort. And since developers need to develop and not test, they needed at least 1, possibly 2 testers on each team to "guide" the testing effort.

My point in all of this is that sometimes you need to read between the lines and understand the spirit of what is being said rather than the literal. Yes, testers are not mentioned. But neither are Analysts or ScrumMasters or agile coaches. Yet each is critical to the success of an agile team. The spirit of "Business people and developers must work together.." is that this is a team effort. And teams need to work together to finish the project.