Today I had a discussion with Michael Bolton on Twitter about software releases. As I felt that my point did not come across correctly in the condensed tweet format, I decided to write an article instead.

This is a new entry in the series "Magic principles in test automation". Today, I will cover the topic of repetition. To read the last one, please check out Magic principles in test automation: Misdirection.

Our current test automation setup for end to end testing is using Maven for preparing the test data, running our test scenarios and creating a test report. Recently, I wanted to refactor the way we use Maven's lifecycles and found a surprisingly easy way to do just that.

This is a new entry in the series "Magic principles in test automation". Today, it is about direction and misdirection. To read the last one, please check out Magic principles in test automation: Clarity.

Since I have been an amateur magician for the last 34 years, this subject naturally influences my thinking on software. This post will kick off a little series on magic principles in relation to test automation.

Recently, I read a Tweet by Maaret Pyhäjärvi concerning the value of test automation. She claimed that "Lack of test automation moves known knowns to unknown knowns."

I strongly agree because if you don't have automation in place to "remind" you of known issues that might come up again, you will forget about them. In my view, test reporting plays a strong role in this as well.