An interesting take on Agile project management

Just yesterday I ran into a friend and former coworker while getting a mid-day coffee. He's the product owner for a project at another local tech firm. With him was the dev manager for the product. The conversation turned towards upcoming product releases (we both have one in less than a month) and agile development. They were recently a Scrum shop, but have switched to XP because of the testing lag problem that I now believe is inherent to most Scrum projects.

But that wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that as a condition of taking this job he demanded to be QA manager first, then added the dev manager role. Brilliant! Our parallel product team coming online with agile is suffering the same issue with regards to test that we have. Namely, the QA manager refuses to buy in and commit any resources at the beginning of development. Or when he does it is only for a short period, then that resource is retasked to pick up every piddly little project that comes along, essentially not being part of the team. Rolling the QA manager role into the dev manager role, while smacking of dictatorship, will remove that main impediment (in my experience) to fully integrating dev and test.