Quality assurance in scrum

Question

What do you think about the adoption of quality assurance in a software house that uses SCRUM as Agile methodology?
Could they live together?

EDIT:
Pheraps I made a mistake using the term "quality assurance". With that, I mean making documentation to describe what the software will do. In an Agile methodology I think that this can't live together with a method based on a continuous update of pre-requisites. It may take more time to write documentation than that spent on developing.
What is the right term to use instead of quality assurance to describe what I mean?

Answer 1

Could they? I am not sure how they can be apart...

Agile is big on short iterations that emphasize running and tested features. You can't really accomplish that without QA.

That being said, I worked for nearly a year and a half on a project in a SCRUM shop that had a very good QA process. QA was the gatekeeper for whether or not a story was considered done for that iteration. If it didn't pass QA, then the Sprint goals were not met, and the story carried over into the next iteration as the highest priority item.

Agile is not about taking short cuts, and there is a heavy emphasis on quality. If you are working somewhere where this is not happening, then you have been hoodwinked (IMHO).