Testing has often been seen as the final stage of creating an application. Since we weren’t shifting testing left as much as we do today, a great deal of work was thrown on the testing team at the very end of an exhausting project cycle. But testers shouldn’t be seen as the last line of defense.

Scrum is one of the most popular paths to agile, but testers sometimes join this framework as an afterthought and aren’t quite sure how they fit into the development flow. Scrum is more than answering three daily questions, and testers are in a position to understand the project better than anyone else on the team.

This idea of a team in charge of itself is difficult for many people to accept. Traditional practices condition us to wait for someone to tell us what to do, and managers are accustomed to controlling everyone’s work and knowing everyone’s status. But agile teams can manage themselves—in fact, it's essential to agile.