I work for a company where the development manager expects a developer to create test cases before writing any code. These test cases have to then be maintained by the developers. Every-so-often a developer will be expected to run through the test cases.

From this you should be able to gather that the company in question is rather small and there are no testers.

Coming from a Software Architect position and having to write / execute test cases wearing my 'tester' hat is somewhat of a shock to the system. I do it anyway but it does seem to be a rather expensive exercise :)

EDIT:

I seem to need to elaborate here: I am not talking about unit-testing, TDD, etc. :)

I am talking about that bit of testing a tester does. Once I have developed a system (with my unit tests / tdd / etc.) the software goes through a testing phase. Should a developer be that tester and developer those test cases?

I think the misunderstanding may stem from the fact that developers, typically, are not involved with this type of testing and, therefore, assumed I am referring to that testing we do do: unit testing. But alas, no.

I hope that clears it up.