I've noticed on my team the developers are very busy toward the beginning of the sprint with the QA people having little to do, while the opposite is true toward the end of the sprint.

This seems inefficient... is there any way to smooth it out?
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Switch to Kanban so that you can balance the flow of work without the cold-start at the beginning of every sprint.

Once you start optimizing for delivery, look at how developers can help with the QA to finish the work instead of starting new items.

Over time, this might reveal team imbalance and drive some staffing decisions and/or tooling improvements.
I'm using a lot of Scrum terms here, but other agile methods are not that different.

Let me make one thing clear first: test cases are not things developers or QA people make up as they go. Test cases are defined alongside the requirements. They need to be there when the implementation starts. Maybe not as automated tests, but at least as a description what should happen when on a piece of paper or in the ticket or as a reference to some electronic document.

Writing those testcases is a lot of work and can be done by QA people whenever they have nothing to do. However, that still leaves QA with one type of work at the start of the sprint and another type at the end of the sprint and the work at the start of a sprint is not even calculated into any kind of velocity because it's not measured as getting a ticket to "done".

The best way I have seen so far is to actually *not* have dedicated QA in the team. It doesn't make sense and wastes a lot of time. Maybe have a single one that can assist all others to become better at testing but can develop little features on their own if no assistance is neccessary.

Normal testing is done by the developers (preferably not the same developer that actually implemented the feature). They make sure a story works. They go by the test cases that are already listed with the story.

The team delivers *potentially releasable* software increments each sprint. The chance that you *actually* want to release that increment are slim. "Agile" lives from the ability to change things until the product owner is truly happy with them. Constantly realeasing a trickle of changes that might later be unchanged or changed in a different way is costly to everybody involved. You cannot run a marketing campaign every sprint. You cannot have ads for every little thing you finish. You cannot have 10 words translated (well, you can, but it might cost just as much as waiting until you have 100). And yes, you cannot have every feature thouroughly QA'd if it doesn't make it into a production release in the end. That's waste.

So your QA team needs to do their job not on every increment, but only on those increments that are to be released. The same as the marketing department, sales, whoever is involved in releasing a new version.

I know a team is supposed to be able to finish a product on their own, but that only goes for the actual implementation. There are no marketers, ad salesmen or translators on your team either. So don't make QA a part of the team. It's neither fun nor a good use of money to QA a feature over and over and over every time the product owner changes it.

Please note that I am talking about QA here. QA is making sure a product is working as it should be. I'm not talking about simple testing. Testing should be done by the developers, how else would they be able to say "I'm done".