Tester and challanges

One of the common question you can hear during job interview for tester role is : why do you want to work as a Tester ? I can see in this question great opportunity to say about passion for testing, to mention about value tester can create and of course it's chance to mention something about solving problems and challenges.

Since I remember I always liked puzzles. It was sometime after I had started my first job as tester when I realized that this kind work doesn’t need to be necessarily boring and I can have a lot fun from it. When you work as tester you often encounter situation where you touch something new that you have never seen before: new system developed in new technology which works in new business environment and you have to collaborate with different stakeholders.
To create value with your testing you need learn quick and this is often great challenge. Of course tester work doesn't always look like this, depending on context you are sometimes obligated to work for same project for long period, to do repetitive task, to create tones of documents and to create evidence for every single piece of test activity. In such situation there is great opportunity to stay in shape as tester and have some fun from testing - it's Weekend Testing movement. These challenges occur usually during weekends. For those who hasn’t had chance to participate there is a place where some of the weekend’s challenges are archived

You can also create challenges by yourself, simply by challenging your thoughts with colleagues, by working on imaginary problem and ways to tackle it, you can try reverse engineering on some web application. There is a lot of ways to keep your Testing DNA in good shape. Good Luck!

Alek