Your team is agile. They write user stories and work in short iterations. They start each iteration with a planning meeting, and close it out with both a demo of their work and a retrospective on how things went. Your agile testers and developers convene a daily stand-up session to assess their progress. They sit close to one another in the office and do a lot of work gathered around whiteboards. They don’t emphasize documentation or try to plan things in much detail beyond the current iteration. Overall, their rhythms and ceremonies are noticeably different from their pre-agile days.
Yet, some aspects of their work seem not to have changed much. On many agile teams, testers end up working in waterfall fashion, waiting for the hand off of a user story from developers before beginning the bulk of their work. This approach creates the same pitfalls as in waterfall projects: hurried test efforts, incomplete testing, slow feedback cycles, and a fragmented sense of quality ownership.