http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lennart_green_does_close_up_card_magic.html

His presentation and the tricks are great! Although it is obvious that he uses trick there’s no way that you can guess/see what he’s doing.

Well, let me share the rest of the story for your readers. I was working in one of the organization that believes Sick (6) Sigma is the way to go about testing. I was asked by my manager to achieve 95% test cases pass in order for our product to meet Six Sigma standards that the entire organization is rated.

Undergoing your training lead me to use the skills I was learning to experiment at work that lead me to find a lot of bugs. I was neither able to associate those bugs with the existing test case document nor they allowed me to add test cases ( because it makes their next cycle complex )

Also, I realized I could use the test idea from a test case run it in an exploratory way by varying some parameters, I found some bugs but those bugs were not accepted because when other testers tried reproducing them using those test cases ( the way they were written ) they couldn’t find it. I had to share my idea of tweaking the test idea to find those bugs.

The estimation of number of test cases that can be run by a tester per month was based on — a tester merely running those tests without finding bugs, reporting them, investigating them and supporting them when a developer needs help.

The more bugs I found, the more other tasks I had to do because again their 6 Sigma process mandated that a bug reported to the bug tracking system has to be supported when developers chose to fix.

Not realizing all this a test manager whom I was reporting to decided to fire me for:

a) For delaying the release by finding bugs
b) Not following the process ( passing 95% of the test cases assigned to me )
c) For not listening to what he said.

Your readers might also be interested to know that I feared to let you know this information because I feared you might not want to coach me further.

I struggled without job, without money for about 6 months till I convinced a friend of mine who in turn convinced his manager to take me by letting them know in advance that I had been fired.

About an year from being fired and being employed in another organization, I took the confidence to let James know that I was fired. I wanted to be more truthful to him and that was the only reason why I chose to share that information with him. I was aware of the risk that he might not consider coaching me further but I was in for a surprise. He appreciated me for getting myself fired from a manager who didn’t value the value. He considered me to be good enough to coach further.

Today I am Satisfice India.

[James' Reply: Nice story, Pradeep. It's popular to use the pass rate of test cases to create a fake sense of test progress. I'm glad you refuse to do that.]

Oh, and you were quite good also, James! I did enjoy the course and I learned from it, and will continue to do so as I revisit my notes and challenge you as well as everything else I encounter!