MoT Leeds

Testing What You Can't Control: Adam Davis

Adam is bringing a live, demo-led session where you (and your phone) become part of the system. We'll be turning the room into a live environment to see exactly how systems behave (and misbehave), outside of
"perfect" conditions. It's hands-on, a little unpredictable, and a great way to look at real-world testing.

Modern systems rarely fail in clean, predictable ways. They fail in the gaps between devices, networks, environments, people, and timing. Yet most of our testing still happens in conditions we carefully control. In this live, demo-led session, Adam Davis will turn the audience itself into part of a distributed system using a side project called pixelmesh. By connecting the room through their phones, attendees will experience first-hand what happens when you introduce real-world unpredictability into a live environment. Different devices. Different signal strengths. Variable lighting. Network instability. Latency. Human behaviour. The kinds of things we all know exist, but often struggle to reproduce meaningfully in testing.

What starts as a synchronised shared display quickly becomes a conversation about observability, resilience, feedback loops, and the uncomfortable reality that systems rarely behave the same way twice once they leave controlled environments. Along the way, Adam will break down some of the engineering challenges behind building pixelmesh, from computer vision and distributed coordination through to synchronisation across large groups of independent devices. More importantly, the session explores how deliberately introducing controlled chaos can expose weaknesses, assumptions, and blind spots long before production does.

This is not a slide-heavy theory session. It is interactive, practical, and intentionally a little unpredictable. If it works perfectly, that tells us something. If it breaks in interesting ways, that tells us even more.