You can now download the PDF of the presentation I gave at DevTeach on What to Test, and When.

My apologies for putting this up so late.

In brief, you can’t provide business value if you can’t ship. Shipping software means more than having some features passing some automated tests, although most of the discussions I’ve been hearing in the Agile circles seems to say that that is enough. Are you really going to be putting credit card numbers into that system before you’ve done any security testing? I hope not. Same thing goes for usability, scalability, etc.

So do you really have to be able to release software every two weeks, or month?

Bottom line, understand the terms and conditions of every release, and plan accordingly - both in development effort as well as in testing scope and amount. Also, sponsor-driven constraints like trade-shows will affect what you need to test and when.

So, viewing testing outside the context of hands-on project management is ineffective.
Why do we have that independent QA department again?