I stand in the middle ground on this one. I fully believe that rote QA testing with huge volumes of test plans is a waste of everyone's time. However automated

I stand in the middle ground on this one. I fully believe that rote QA testing with huge volumes of test plans is a waste of everyone's time. However automated testing doesn't take into account the fact that people are almost always the primary users of your software, and so I feel somewhere there should be a person or persons who occasionally smoke test the application to make sure that things are working cohesively from an end-user perspective and just making sure everything makes sense. If this person is the prototypical product owner, that's great, if you can find one that's not in meetings all day...