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.

Lately, I have been thinking about the old discussion about the purpose, pros and cons of automated tests.

There are different opinions when it comes to test automation and I will try to break them down one by one.

A little disclaimer first: this is not about bragging! I would just like to take the oportunity to tell you a little bit about my journey into test automation. In fact I presented this during the Nordic Testing Days 2019 conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

At trivago, we use a Cucumber based framework for end-to-end tests of our most important web applications. Cucumber stores test result as JSON files which can be turned into human-readable test reports.

Up until now we used the widespread cucumber-reporting Maven plugin.