Is There a Separate Quality Assurance Team?

The danger is you don't want to develop a adversarial relationship between the two departments. Just like I as a software engineer, I don't want the hardware team to throw hardware over the wall to me. So we do want to be able to collaborate even within the concept, even within a single sprint. You need QA experts who can put on the mini heart and just poke holes into your beautiful software all day long.