Abstract
Software globalization is an inevitable step for many companies. Developing for a global market requires the internationalization of software products and their localization to different countries, regions, and cultures. Internationalization and localization testing verifies that localized variants of the software product work, look and feel as expected. The highly repetitive task of testing of multiple language variants makes localization testing a perfect candidate for automation with a high potential to reduce the involved human effort and to speed-up release cycles. However, there is surprisingly little support for localization testing by existing test automation tools. Furthermore, there are only few empirical results or practical insights available as the topic is rarely addressed in the scientific literature. In this paper we describe the process and tools applied for automated testing of the different localized variants of a large commercial software product, we report on the issues detected with automated localization tests, and we discuss our experiences and lessons learned.
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Notes
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The work reported in this paper has been conducted in context of the development of a commercial software product, which constrains the publication of defect data. An aggregated overview of detected issues is provided in Table 1.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET center SCCH (FFG 844597).
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Ramler, R., Hoschek, R. (2017). Process and Tool Support for Internationalization and Localization Testing in Software Product Development. In: Felderer, M., Méndez Fernández, D., Turhan, B., Kalinowski, M., Sarro, F., Winkler, D. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10611. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69926-4_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69926-4_27
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