There can be multiple reasons your automation behaves differently than you expect.
See a couple of explanations below. If this article doesn't explain the behavior of your automation, feel free to contact us at support@castoredc.com.
Automations are only triggered if the event is executed
This means that if you already have executed the event (e.g. updating a field value, or adding an email address), then the automation will not run retrospectively. The event needs to be executed, before the automation runs.
Automations that send surveys are only triggered once per participant ID
This means that if you have archived a participant for which the automation already triggered, then it won't be triggered again if you recreate a participant with the same ID. This is something that often happens during testing.
If you're using multiple show/hide visit/form automations on 1 field...
Only 1 field can trigger 1 automation. In that case, you should use a separate field (e.g. calculation) for each automation.
A query will only be created once when the automation is triggered
A query will only be created once when the automation is triggered and it is not possible for the same query to be created again within the same field of a specific participant ID. For example, if a query is triggered for a participant with ID 100001 for a field 'Date', if the participant is deleted (e.g. during testing phase) and re-created again, a query will not be triggered for the 'Date' field for the newly created participant ID 100001.