Summary

For a product to be world-ready, the whole design, development, and QA process must be globalized. Consequently, the QA organization will need to add another layer to test processes established without globalization in mind-namely, requiring that all design documents, practices, and procedures be world-ready. After ensuring the functionality of the core product through globalized testing, determine if the product is going to be localized. If so, localizability testing and localization testing will be needed.

Whenever a piece of code handles text or deals with locale-sensitive functionality, it has to be tested for proper functionality. Globalized testing must go beyond breaking the code-page dependency in the test data and checking for cultural accuracy. Some general areas to focus on in globalized testing include multilingual text processing with no data loss, correct encoding conversions, and proper handling of locale settings.

Localizability testing verifies that the UI of the program being tested can be easily translated to any target language without re-engineering or making code modifications. Since localizability bugs have to be fixed in the code of the application, they must be looked for at the earliest stage of development possible. However, the problems that cause bugs to appear in the first place usually only become apparent once localization is done. Because of the inevitable long time span between an application's development and its localization, run a pseudo-localized test; perform code, UI, and documentation review; and run a pilot localization project.

Finally, localization testing checks how well the build has been translated into a particular target language and is based on the results of globalized testing where the functional support for that particular locale has already been verified. This test should focus on things that are altered during localization, such as the UI and content files. It should also involve culture-specific, language-specific, and country-specific areas; setup, upgrade, and uninstall tests that are run in the localized environment; and finally, application and hardware compatibility tests. Globalized testing, localizability testing, and localization testing, once conducted, complete the testing process required for shipping an internationalized product.