I started my career at Microsoft in 1994 working on the Windows 95 International Test team. Globalization testing is a unique specialty in software testing just like performance, security, and other specific areas of testing. Globalization testing doesn’t necessarily require a tester to be bi-lingual, or be from a country other than the United States. [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Time is a commodity in short supply. I have been juggling a lot lately and there never seems to be enough time to do everything I need to do, and even less time to do the things I want to do. (Blogging falls under the want to do category.) I wish sometimes I could slow [...]
The ability of our software products to function correctly in a global environment is becoming more and more important. Our software should support national conventions used by the various locales around the globe. For example, in some regions of the world the period character is used as the number group separator and the comma is [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, November 12, 2009
The past series of posts have focused on one of localization testing which describes the largest category of localization class issues reported by testers performing localization testing, and what we categorize as usability/behavioral type issues because they adversely impact the usability of the software or how end users interact with [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Part 1 provided an overview of localization class issues, and Part II discussed issues with non-translated strings in a localized product and gave some helpful hints to manage that problem during the software development lifecycle. In Part III I will cover various issues with access key mnemonics. An access key [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Friday, October 30, 2009
I should be of no surprise to anyone that localization testing generally focuses on changes in the user interface, although as mentioned in the previous post these are not the only changes necessary to adapt a product to a specific target market. But, the most common category of localization [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, October 27, 2009
When I first joined Microsoft 15 years ago I was on the Windows 95 International team. Our team was responsible for reducing the delta between the release of the English version and the Japanese version to 90 days, and I am very proud to say that we achieved that goal [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Monday, January 14, 2008
Years ago life was pretty simple with regard to data input. Most computer programs were limited to ASCII characters and a set of character glyphs mapped into the code points between 0×80 and 0xFF (high or extended ASCII) depending on the language. The set of characters was limited to [...]
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, December 24, 2006
Well, for those of you living outside the Pacific Northwest you are probably unaware of the recent wind storm with winds gusting to 60+ miles per hour that left more than 1 million people on the eastern side of the state without power. The damage was pretty extensive, and since [...]
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, November 12, 2006 3
After a week in Boston presenting at the 3rd Software Testing and Performance Conference I am relaxing in Baltimore (where I grew up) visiting family and friends. For the second year in a row I presented a workshop on functional and structural testing techniques, and also presented a double-track [...]