As we all know how important is to sell a product in foreign market. For that very reason, we need the process of localization to customize user interface and adapting graphics for a specific culture/locale of domestic software product ready to barter in the crucial market outside the domestic region.
And if there is software product ready to be deployed in alien market, then there is a need of quality check and ensuring that the product is Right. Organizations spend money on local QA testing engineers and Foreign Language Experts to test a product, there are chances that they might be testing the product by only a set of local symbols. However foreign user’s perspective can be different in understanding words.
In that way, it would be a great idea to make a global community of Software Engineers, who knows their language well and let them test the application and then they report defects efficiently. That team/community can be known as Crowd Sourced Localization Testing Team. And it is best to give them a chance instead of testing it in domestic market by foreign language experts.
In this respect, organization can utilize crowd sourcing in localization validation by gathering the knowledge expertise of Crowd Sourced Localization Testing Team to reduce time and effort of testing. As region specific QA engineers are able to understand and interpret languages faster than foreign language expert and QA engineer. This will provide synergism of foreign language expert and QA testing engineer.
Crowd sourcing used for localization validation/testing includes involving of different tester from different parts of the world to test your application. It is an emerging trend in software testing it provides the effectiveness, efficiency and benefits of crowd sourcing and the cloud platform. It is absurd to expect a single group of person from same local to establish proficiency in all the languages and cultures from all over the world and perform testing, also it is expensive. Thus we need to differ from our traditional testing methods in which the testing is carried out by a number of different testers from various places, and not hired by professionals and consultants. In crowd sourcing small groups of people from each local are used to perform the testing on the software.
Just to take an example:
To launch your software in different parts of the world.
You initially release a Beta version and get it tested by different group of people from different parts of the world.
Create a graph for the bugs reported and spot out all the bugs with high number of reports and similar suggestion for the fix and fix them, continue this process till the number of reports for a single bug comes to an acceptable level.
This will provide you the best optimized software at very reasonable cost.
Crowd testing has emerged as the latest trend to get your software tested by people from different geographical locations. People belonging to the regions where the language is dominantly spoken/ used can be engaged for the task. Usually localization testing is done using mock strings of the particular language, this can also be done by regular functional testers who are not familiar with the language. But engaging people who know the grammatical technicalities of the language is always a plus.
Let us take another example where the tests are to be done for Chinese language, from the pool of Crowd testing experts who are from china the task would be pretty easy:
1st: These guys are regular functional testers, they Understand and command the testing methodology.
2nd: They know the language well, this would always be a plus point as compared to a test engineer who is not familiar with the language.
This way you would not only get your application tested from functional point of view but also the localization tests would be more reliable.
Summary: Crowd testing has emerged as the latest trend to get your software tested by people from different geographical locations. People belonging to the regions where the language is dominantly spoken/ used can be engaged for the task. Crowd Sourced Localization Testing Team to reduce time and effort of testing.
