This reminds me of a story I read once about how Bell Labs engineers wanted to find the ideal length of a landline telephone chord. They did this by secretly shortening the chord over time on test users' telephones and waited to see how short they could make the chord before they noticed. If the plugtest is hardware-hardware testing Bell Labs engineers were doing human-hardware testing.<p>I tried to find a source for the story but I couldn't find one. I think I read it in <i>The Innovators</i> by Walter Isaacson, but I can't remember it exactly - maybe I'm misremembering it.
Similarly the Bluetooth SIG organises "Unplugfests" which are the same, but for a wireless protocol. I attended several back when I was doing Bluetooth stuff full time. You learn a lot about how a very clearly written spec can be interpreted in 5 different ways!
Reminds me of the "USB Cart of Death"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hm3NzLeO8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hm3NzLeO8</a>
Also in the similarly camp: NFL "RF War Games". Everyone running radio gear at the Superbowl all fires up their radios at once to determine who's interfering with who to resolve interference issues before the show.<p><a href="https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/behind-the-scenes/nfl-event-frequency-coordinators/" rel="nofollow">https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/behind-the-scenes/nfl-eve...</a><p><a href="https://www.mixonline.com/live-sound/tackling-rf-for-the-super-bowl-wireless-mic" rel="nofollow">https://www.mixonline.com/live-sound/tackling-rf-for-the-sup...</a>