Fred and Malcolm,

For our vertical market app, we have the following ratios of staff, and everyone's pretty consistently busy without lag times:
Developer -- 60%
QA -- 26%
Documentation -- 14%


Jay

>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)?