Today I visited Facebook to post a notice of my upcoming trip to New Zealand.
There will be three stops on the tour: Auckland (for Testers and Automation, Avoiding the Traps, February 17-19), Wellington (Testers and Automation, Avoiding the Traps, February 24-26), and Christchurch (Rapid Software Testing Explored, March 10-12). Facebook’s AI Layer (I’ll just call that FAIL) offered to turn it into an event. I accepted the offer, and watched as FAIL made a complete hash of it.
The FAIL created a single event that started at midnight, Eastern Standard Time, on February 17, and that ended at midnight, February 20. I wanted to change the times, but the only times and time zones I was offered were for Toronto (Eastern Standard Time) and Romanian (Eastern European Standard Time). The event was pinpointed on the Auckland Sky Tower — which is a cool location, to be sure, but the classes won’t be held there. I couldn’t quickly find a way to get around all this — and I observed that at least one person had viewed the mangled information.
The Non-critical AI Fanboys (NAIFs) will, of course, say “Hey, it got the first one right! It works!” But saying that is claiming that failure is partial success. By that standard, anything can be said to work if it satisfies even a single success criterion and fails in every other dimension.
So, I wrote a different, simpler post on Facebook about that. Here’s the text:
Here on Facebook, I created a single post that described three events. I accepted the offer to Boost it. Facebook’s AI completely bollixed it. After that, Facebook’s regular, non-AI limitations made it impossible to correct all the errors and inappropriatenesses.
Just another day in Software Land.
If you’d like to avoid problems in design, development, deployment, and production, excellent testing will help you become aware of them. That gives you opportunity to address those problems before they get any farther — before it’s too late.
And if you’d like learn how to do testing quickly, inexpensively, and expertly, see my schedule — incluing an intinerary for my upcoming trip to New Zealand — at https://developsense.com/schedule
So then what happened? Without any particularly good reason, the FAIL decided to turn that post into an Event, offering this preview.
The FAIL fabricated all this, of course. “Software Land Event” is a pretty silly title, but the description is worse — “output-shaped”, but not good output. There was no date anywhere in the post; the FAIL just arbitrarily set something up for tomorrow (as I write) at 5:00pm. Based on my experience with the first post, I reckoned that it would be more effort to fix the AI’s offering than to create an event from scratch, so this time I clicked neither on Create Event nor on Edit Event.
Maybe I’ll do deeper testing of this later, but I’ve got work to do. For now, let’s not refer to experiences like this as “partial success”.