Fred,

For some great thoughts on testing and integrating testing into your programming efforts 'holistically' vs. formalizing testing as a seperate and independent phase of development, read up on Extreme Programming.

For a good start there's www.extremeprogramming.org.

And/or go to Amazon and search on the topic 'Extreme Programming' and read the reviews.

Although not a book about testing per se, the work 'The Mythical Man Month' is a classic for analyzing ratios and estimating time lines. Worth reading in and of itself.

The above advice aside, my experience on working on large software projects at big corporations is the following:

- Testing budgeted at 10-15% of project effort
- Time required for actual testing - 25-40% of project effort

Good topic - I'm interested in following this thread.

Regards,
Malcolm


>>Is a general estimate of the ratio of programming time to testing time?
>
>Let's try this in English.
>
>Are there any general rules or guide lines covering the amount of testing time in regards to development time (actual programming hours)?