I've worked on a project where developers who wrote the (failing) tests were different from the developers implementing the necessary code to make them pass.

I found it really effective.

In that case, only the tests related to the current iteration were written once.

  So what you suggest is perfectly possible in that kind of scenario.

I've worked on a project where developers who wrote the (failing) tests were different from the developers implementing the necessary code to make them pass and I found it really effective.

In that case, only the tests related to the current iteration were written once. So what you suggest is perfectly possible in that kind of scenario.