Testing localized software – What are the alternatives?

When determining how to QA your localized software, it is important to consider the issues involved in each of these alternatives:

  • In-house QA
  • In-country freelancers
  • Offshore outsourcing
  • Localized screen shot review
  • Full-service localization testing provider

In-house QA

Many companies have effective QA methodologies and expertise in-house used to achieve the highest quality possible in their source language product release; it’s tempting to piggy-back on this infrastructure when performing QA on localized releases as well. This is not recommended due to the often overlooked cost of maintaining the IT infrastructure for numerous languages (OS versions, server platforms, etc.) as well as the costs and difficulties of properly staffing the team with native-speaking QA professionals. In addition, keeping the QA staff busy year round is quite challenging, causing a significant waste of money and time between releases.

In-country freelancers

In some cases, a QA freelancer can be found in the target country of the localized language. While this freelancer may be an excellent QA engineer, the nature of their business structure can be problematic for testing localized software:

  • It’s most likely they have little to no IT support for configuration and OS platforms.
  • Due to disparate geographical locations, management oversight can be problematic.
  • There is no natural mechanism or workflow established for knowledge sharing or resource sharing between QA freelancers working on different languages.
  • In many cases, the freelancer is primarily a translator who performs QA on the side; QA and translation are very different tasks requiring very different skill sets.

Offshore outsourcing

Outsourcing to low-cost QA centers in locations such as China or India may be tempting based on the initial price evaluation. A closer examination shows that the effectiveness of QA is typically much lower with offshore QA.

Without native language speakers, only a small portion of the localization defects will be found along with only the most obvious functional bugs. Linguistic issues are left to be discovered in a separate process, and sometimes by the customer, increasing time-to-market and spreading the QA budget even thinner. Issues of business culture and intellectual property management also require careful consideration before offshore outsourcing is undertaken.

Localized screen shot review

Some companies test localized software by capturing screenshots and sending them to their linguists for QA. This method allows adequate checking of cosmetic issues on each screen, but since the tester does not actually use the application, or see the flow from one screen to another, mistakes caused by incorrect context translations are easily missed.

QA also involves more than simply screen checking. It is important to check input in different languages and in different scenarios. This method helps to uncover cosmetic bugs as well as functional and linguistic bugs, bugs that screen capture-based QA alone will not find.

Full-service localization testing provider, Net-Translators

Full-service localization providers like Net-Translators offer the QA expertise, professional staff, language coverage, proven methodology, and cost-effectiveness that help you achieve excellence in localization testing.