Bringing in Business Value?

We have been working with the developers there on writing more and more unittesting coverage. However, now I am thinking that we probably should turn around and start writing acceptance test.

Talked to the QA on Friday and boy was she streessed out. They don't have any automated test. What's worse, they don't even have a testing script. She has an Excel spreadsheet that contains a list of "objectives". Whenever there is a new release, someone will deploy it on the testing server. She gets the notification and goes through her objectives. For each item, she has to access the database to find out a suitable testing data, then go to the site do the manual test. Because the database is synchronized with production periodically, there is no testing data setup. And all the steps are in the QA's head. Even the most simple test, for example, testing validating of the datefield for a user who wants to set up absence email, is not a trivial task, and it DOES get broken from time to time.

Since agile process is always about bringing business value to the customer at an early stage, I think we should write automated web tests to relief the QA of the burden, rather than keep doing exercise with the developers. It is fun and all but after all it is just writing unit test for existing features, most of which none of us (including their developers) understand.