>> 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.

I have only counted the time the are 6 or 7 testers have billed. I have not included the 2 Testing Managers' time or the liason analyst. My experience has been 1 to 1 but the Testers had automated testing tools. These people do everything by hand.