Testing is as creative as your company/boss allows it to be.

Maybe look for a company that is just getting into serious testing? That way they might not have much established and you can provide some of the direction for them.

I would not 100% trust someone who tells you that you fit the description of a tester. They have some pre-conceived idea of what a tester does and they think you possess those qualities. Do you trust this person? I have seen people tell programmers or computer engineers that they should be testers. It was their way of saying, you are not good enough to be a programmer, so go test.

My personal opinion is that testing can be a very creative process.
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Costinn

for me testing is creative, because I am working in a railway environment (interlocking solutions - mainly black box testing) and I have the chance to learn the rail philosophy from different countries from Europe, so the writing of the test cases is a great challenge for me, especially when you have to understand the requirements and in the same time, the safety conditions for each country.
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Geek

Lets start with your question by what do you mean by being creative? If you mean that you can apply your brain and solve problems that possibly add value to some one, testing will certainly fit the bill. We question product to validate the claims made by developers and give our opinion on whether product is good enough or not to solve some problems for its end user. It is very creative.

Since you are still in final year and have some time before you can take decision on what you want to do, learn as much about testing as you can. Take a informed decision, in this forum you will hardly get some one saying that testing is not creative. We do testing for our living and enjoy it, thats why we participate in forums like this. Hope it helps.

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Andrew

In Software Testing, ideas are not soda cans. Recycling sucks. I was recently asked an intriguing question at my blog. The question was simple: do you have to be a programmer to write automated tests? Everything's conditional. You just can't always anticipate the conditions. But I struggled a bit to answer the question because to me the answer is not as simple as yes or no. But I have a feeling that well-considered thought to the question is at the heart of what happens to the future of automated testing. Just because its inexplicated doesn't mean it's inexplicable. Many career testers are feeling the pressure of picking up 'automated testing' skills in today's job market because every IT company wants it. On the one hand, it's not fair to put someone into the position of architecting and building or even maintaining an automated test system without having any education\understanding of the sound programming skills and practices that are necessary. You guys are still thinking like software developers when you should be thinking like plumbers. Come on, I wanna see some butt crack.

Union rules. I can't check out this software coder seeping gonorrhea this close to lunch. On the other hand, why would anyone with good programming skills choose to enter into the thankless, dead-end, glass-domed, low-paying and under-respected testing career path? Let's be honest, they wouldn't unless they recognized it as an entry point into a much more lucrative development career path. Oh! Level Three. Have you called Jack Bauer? I know I'm an ass

The latter is exactly the reason multi-billion dollar corporations have recognized that there's a huge market in creating easy to use automated test tools that require special skills to operate but no programming is necessary to be up and running and fairly successful in a short period of time. I think Mercury and IBM haven't done us any favors though. They're marketing these 'record-and-playback' tools (in a way that's reminiscent of Sun Microsystems early Java marketing) as entry level tools and creating a misperception in the market-place that deep technical knowledge and understanding of software systems is not necessary for automated testing. When my boss claims that I can't test anything on an abnormal environment, I say that's so close-minded! It's not "abnormal", It's special :-P It sounds as if I'm leaning strongly towards a 'yes you pretty much do have to be a programmer to write automated tests.' doesn't it? So this is where my brain starts to spin in circles as I contemplate the paradox we're in. If you think about it, Automated testing is right now about where we were in 1995 with web application development. (And yes I am actually old enough to speak from experience about that). My work is like an intricate Austrian metro system. All trains run on time. I believe automated testing has absolutely tremendous potential and we haven't even cracked the egg yet. There are so many frontiers to explore in this arena such as artificial intelligence, service-oriented testing, intelligent dimensional data analysis�the list goes on. What else turns you on? Drugs? Casual Sex? Rough sex? Casual rough sex on drugs? I'm an tester, need to know...

So how do we convince the bright, talented innovative thinkers in IT that automation can be a destination too, not just a path to another better job? I really don't know any quick answers as the problem is a systemic one and touches on the mindset of the whole industry. What am I looking for? Same as you. Love, acceptance, a solid return in investment... Distractions

My two big suggestions are to:

1. Raise the bar in how we define the skill set needed to do this work and realize that an automated test developer is actually a programmer and 2. Open up research and development projects that make automated testing a destination instead of a half-way house.

I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, and then embrace my own. The usual...

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Rajesh

Indeed..Raise the bar .. If some one starts thinking verification and validation is the only process in testing it could be boring for anyone ..If some one asks you to just test using the test cases given by a client its indeed boring

Everyone needs to come out of the shell, Question the requirement /Specification and think your self as a user and enggr going to impement the same Question the design.. Because the developer will think only abt his module ..come out of the box and think abt the impact Question the code ..I mean read it .. You need to know how object oriented programs work, How operating system work, what is memory, how to handle multi threaded applications, What the heck is RBBMS.. ultimately any programming language has to use all of this ..if or for or while is common ..object is common.. and prevent bugs rather than fixing them later on

Design your test cases with customer focus and engineering knowledge

As for automated testers I use the junior Enggrs to record and play back ..Seniors, I will use them for designing and coming up with scenarios and figure out what needs to be automated.

Security,Performance,Reliability, Capability,Usability, I18n,L10n,I508 .. there are more

This is just a start as you grow you need to raise bar and learn new things..

As long as you learn every day, everything is creative....

A Thought :
"I am a tester not because I cannot write code as good as a developer. But because I can help them create better software"
Think abt the situation if you are just worried abt the program you write ..who will think of the problems it can cause when it works together with other programs
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Walter

I think it's time that I comment, especially in light of the comments made by one group member, who I've warned--off-list--for making personal attacks on group members.

Is testing creative? There are a few issues to consider.
* What does creative mean to you? Does it mean you have a lot of opportunities to express yourself. Does it mean that you will do many diverse things? Does it mean that you don't do the same thing over and over?
* What are you comparing it to? The construction industry? A job as a lab technician? One in the legal profession? Life as a chef? A job in a traditionally "creative field"? Depending on that criteria, you could come up with a different answer.

It also depends on where you are working and how your company approaches testing. It also depends on the "school" of testing that is used. Most beginning testing jobs are in companies where you simply perform the same steps over and over. That can be very uncreative. However as you advance, you have to learn to write those steps. That can be creative. Also, in these companies, you may be required to find novel solutions to produce or
reproduce certain scenarios.

However, if you find yourself working in a company that encourages exploratory testing, either as your primary testing activity or in support of "scripted" testing, then you will have a very creative job. You have to think about the system under test and how to expose bugs.

I'll address this one other way: your job is only as creative as YOU make it. One taxi driver could say that his job is not creative because all he does is drive passengers around all day. Another taxi driver could say that it creative because she tries to find the best routes. Another could say it's creative because he enjoys meeting the people that he drives. It's the same with testing. It is only as creative as make it.

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Bernard Homes

As you are a Computer engineering student, I will assume that you are comparing the creativity from testers to the ceativity from Developpers.

As in many different professions, opportunities for creativity exist, but they are not all available at all levels. Comparin the tester's goals to the developper's goal, you can say that the developer looks for _one_ solution that fits the specifications, while the tester has to (should) find _all_ the defects that were introduced in the development process (from specificaiton to code). As such the challenge is much more interesting, just as the challenge for the "hunter" is greater than for the "harvester".

You will enjoy creativity in coming up with different attacks (methods for finding defects) to show presence (or absence) of defects. However, it is most likely that you will first have to execute tests created by others (less creativity here). Then you will have enough understanding of the different types of possible defects, and conceive new tests that others will execute (more creativity).

In the end you may come up with completely new paradigms on testing, and that is the greatest creativity possible (IMHO).

What you will always find are different views by people who are considered to belong to "schools" of thoughts, and you will have to understand that there is not a single method (suggested by a school [any school]) that will be able to be used in all the different contexts you may encounter.  And here is the greatest creativity of all: be able to design the best set of tests to find the largest number of most important defects in the systems that you will test. And I am speaking of systems, so you will have to learn about many different environments, hardware, software (and software languages), and the context where these systems are being used.

The creativity is not based on company, nor on the team where you will work. It is based only on how you look at your work: if you limit yourself to executing again and again the same activity (without learning new things) then it will not be creative. If you limit the scope of your thoughts to one school of thinking (schools) the same thing will happen, and you will not find creativity. On the other hand, if you challenge your own knowledge and try to expand it always, then you will have the opportunity to be both creative and recognized by your peers.

With over 26 years in experience, 15 of which in development, I can tell you that I never had as much fun in development as i have now in testing.