to reiterate on parents endorsement for agile and the point that you seem to be taking issue with: nothing in Agile says you can't run final acceptance tests or

to reiterate on parents endorsement for agile and the point that you seem to be taking issue with: nothing in Agile says you can't run final acceptance tests or integration tests before shipping. This is exactly right. I work in a highly regulated space, and we have been working in an Agile framework for awhile now. There are two iterations baked into every release cycle (at the end) for final regression testing. That cycle will re-run every test case generated during the program increment, plus additional test cases chosen based on areas of the application that were touched during development. On top of final validation, we also have an acceptance validation team that runs full integration tests after final validation is complete.