> They have a testing department and it spends about 8 times the number of >hours testing the application than the single programmer spent on it.

I don't know the situation, but sounds pretty high to me. My experience has been that a formal test team should take 1.5 to 2.0 times the amount of time to test than the dev team takes to dev and debug. This is assuming a one-to-one ratio of testers and devs.