There appears to be quite a long thread going on at TheServerSide.com about whether or not agile development reduces the need for QA staff. Apparently it all started from Floyd Marinescu's blog entry about what Scott Ambler had said in his presentation to the Toronto Association of Systems & Software Quality.

The TSS thread has a lot of FUD flying around, although Dave Rooney and Scott Ambler seemed to be doing a pretty good job at keeping it real. Scott's description of what he actually said in his presentation can be found from this post near the middle of the discussion thread.

We sort of touched on this topic yesterday in the closing panel of Testaus 2006 as well. I really do believe that good professional testers are worth their salt also in the context of agile development. It's the grunt work of regression testing that test automation, for example, off-loads from testing staff and the time savings automation yields on regression testing can be used for more productive and more exciting work--the kind of stuff we're actually better than the computer.

Also, the change is not going to be quick. There's plenty of learning to do and, frankly, not everyone is into that sort of thing. In the meantime, some organizations are able to get an edge over the competition with effective test automation and skilled testers with a smart mix of approaches such as context-driven and session-based, exploratory testing techniques. It's those organizations that are both creating better software and doing it faster.