James is an independent consultant, specialising in systems testing. He helps organisations to find surprises, to adapt their approaches, and to keep their testers interested – and helps people to make informed and practical decisions about their testing. A regular keynote speaker and teacher at international events, and an active participant in a variety of testing communities, James has written award-winning papers, built the Black Box puzzles, kicked off the TestLab, and run the London Exploratory Workshop in Testing. He received the 2015 European Tester Excellence award.

In this hands-on track, you’ll explore very simple systems to discover surprising emergent behaviours.

You’ll find dynamic systems that (under the wrong conditions) resonate, explode, jitter or simply die. We’ll look at the ways that these tiny systems produce such pathologies, how to trigger them, how to observe them, and how you might be able to regulate them in the complex systems we build.

Bring a device with a browser, and have fun with systems analysis.