"You don't need to come on Monday. You're fired!"
Those were the words that got branded in my brain at the end of my very first test manager assignment.
...It was a project developing a state of the art touch screen smartphone that would revolutionise the world.
"This is an opportunity of a lifetime"
I thought when starting on the job. So, I spent the first six months perfecting our testing processes. We were doing everything as right as humanly possible. Our acceptance tests championed a pass rate of 98% and the feature owners cheered.
The lightning struck when our CTO got the prototype in his hands. The screen had haptic feedback so that tapping it would feel like pressing real buttons. The feature was specified just right. "The device shall produce a haptic feedback on a screen event in less than 50ms"
The tests were planned and executed right as well. Pass rates were booming and everything was seemingly right.
...The only problem was that swiping the screen caused more than one event on the screen. A LOT more! When swiping pics in the gallery, the phone instantly became a vibrator in the hands of our CTO. With a little dildo in his hand his expression was priceless. He forced a polite smile and said "carry on!"
Three weeks later I got the message. I got fired and the whole project got terminated.
I blamed everyone else for the downfall. I blamed the stupidity of my clients, bosses and colleagues until...
...one night months after the incident I woke up in a realisation.
I had nobody else to blame but myself. After all, I had been the test manager. And looking myself at the mirror, I knew I had lacked the skill to see and lead our quality to a better outcome.