What QUALITIES do you think a QA Professional Need

I often get asked "What traits-qualities do you look for when hiring a QA professional?".

Here is my answer -

1) If you are looking for a software tester - select a creative personality as they are going to think outside of the box and duplicate your end customer expectations.(usually seen as a manual black box tester)

2) if you are looking for a SDET or junior developer wanting to work in the testing department then you select an analytical personality as they are going to think inside of the box and like a logical developer (usually seen as a wannabe developer writing unit tests for a developer)

3) if you are looking for a QA professional then you you look for a MIDDLE BRAINED half creative - half intellectual personality that not only think like a customer and perform manual testing but also can sit down and write automation frameworks to exercise the code developers have created. The best part of being a QA professional - they see both sides and analyze the creative-marketing aspect and the intellectual development aspect and ALSO consider the most important aspect to success the BUSINESS success aspect.

And the QA professional is always the expert on every facet of the end result of a customer experience - they know the back-end - front-end - the servers - the bandwidth - every single factor that plays in the to the end result.