Notes from a great session on device automation at scale
16 Sep 2026
In this moment:
Teresa Reynolds
MoT Cambridge
I went to a session hosted by the Cambridge Chapter where Shiva Shimoga talked through how his team got from "where do we even start?" to a device automation setup that scaled as the company grew. A few things stuck with me.
Flaky tests get harder with hardware in the mix. Is it the software, the firmware, the test harness, or the device? It turned out the hardware itself was surfacing problems that never showed up earlier in development. Over 50% of bugs were caught during physical smoke tests run against a range of real devices.
The rig wasn't your normal test harness. Power switches, video switches, USB switches, a frame grabber, audio loopback. The Python tests followed a simple structure: setup, test, assert, clean up.
Discipline mattered as much as tooling. Test code was treated like production code. Tests could run in any order. One assertion per test. Test names described the scenario. Nothing fancy, but I bet those rules saved a lot of pain later.
Scaling was deliberate. One proof-of-concept rig became eight, covering around 80% of the market share of devices in use. A binary sorting approach helped narrow failures down to unique builds, and making the work visible was key to buy-in, understanding and collaboration.
My favourite takeaway: compatibility is not the same as compliance. You can work within a spec's tolerances, but that doesn't help the customer who just wants your device to work with theirs. The rigs helped with both. And over time the testing grew well beyond end-to-end functionality into hardware security, compliance, latency, soak and performance work.
Neil Younger
Head of Engineering
Neil brings over 20 years’ experience building successful products and fostering joyful teams, with people at the heart of his work. He’s a UK-based engineering leader focused on creating psychologically safe environments where teams learn, collaborate, and deliver high-quality software. He’s interested in where engineering practice, quality thinking, and clear communication meet.
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