One of the things that XP encourages is generalists rather than specialists. Anyone on the team should be able to do any of the team's activities. This is a bit slower to start, but over time amplifies the team's effectiveness by reducing bottlenecks and lowering the team's truck number.
As a tester coming into an XP team, this can prove to be a challenge. I possess a different set of skills than most of the other team members, so how do I fit in a generalist team? Testing isn't the only discipline with this conundrum. The other role that is called out from the XP team is the customer. So, in a generalist team, we now have two specialized roles: customer and tester.
A tester is really just one person playing multiple roles - in a way, I'm a generalist. Sometimes, I act like a developer. One morning, I pair with a developer and we write unit tests. Then I pair with another developer and we write automated acceptance tests for a completely different module of the software. Late in the afternoon, I sit with the product manager (our "customer") and we work on a new story. It's not exactly what I think most XP types call a generalist, but it's a start.
In some ways, though, I'm a specialist. I exist to provide information. I support development with testing and feedback. I support the business with information about risk and the current state of the system. In general, I find that this ends up making the standard XP test tasks better. My exploratory testing on a new story finds issues that we simply didn't anticipate. Then we add automated tests for a lot of it.
So yes, I'm something of a specialist when I join a team. I don't think this is a bad thing, although it does seem to go against some XP principles. We're not following XP to the letter. I happen to think that this is fine; I'm not dogmatic about the processes I follow. Where it doesn't work for our situation, we'll change it until it does.*
* I know this rubs some process zealots a very wrong way. If you have a real-world solution where you've been able to follow any process 100%, I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, I will continue to make my customers happy, even if it means that some parts of XP get modified a bit to help us do that.