Somewhere between 1 hour and 10,000 hours.
An example where it is 1 hour......
Requirement: Take input file provided by client in EDI format and transform it to a standardized XML format
How do I test this in 1 hour? I build a couple of EDI Documents to serve as input and then a couple of more XML Documents the are the expected output of the conversion. Code is complete and delivered, I run each of the created input files through the app and compare the output with the expected output document I created. The creation of the input and expected output data is not part of test execution but rather of test planning so I can complete all testing of this 1000 man hours of development in 1 hour with about another 200 - 300 hours of test planning.
An example where it takes 10,000 hours
Requirement: Convert existing PHP based Web application to a Java based Web Application.
Why does this take 10 times as long to test as it does to code? Because the developers only need to write it once, I need to test it on many different machine configurations. If this is application is in a consumer facing website then I would realistically have to test it on some combination of ...
Operating Systems: Win 98 First Edition, Win 98 Second Edition, Win ME, Win 2K Pro, Win 2K Home, Win XP Home, Win XP Pro, Win XP Media Center, Vista, Mac OS 7.6.1, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Mac OS 10
Browsers: Netscape 7, Netscape 8, IE 5, IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera
That alone comes to about 62 possible configurations and I havn't even touched different service packs, different security patch levels, different Java versions, etc. realistically I could NEVER test on all of the possible meaningful different machine configurations. With this project I could easily spend 10,000 man hours testing and another 4,000 - 5,000 man hours test planning for only 1000 hours of development.
So as you can see the very concept of an "average" amount of time to test something is irrelivant, every project and product and envrionment is different and average times from other projects, products, and envrionments are irrelivant
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