After the environment has been set for globalization testing, you must pay
special attention to potential globalization problems when you run your regular
test cases:
Put greater importance on test cases that deal with the input/output of
strings, directly or indirectly.
Test data must contain mixed characters from East Asian languages,
German, Complex Script characters (Arabic, Hebrew, Thai), and optionally,
English. In some cases, there are limitations, such as the acceptance of
characters that only match the culture/locale. It might be difficult to
manually enter all of these test inputs if you do not know the languages in
which you are preparing your test data. A simple Unicode text generator may
be very helpful at this step.
Recognize the problems
The most serious globalization problem is functionality loss, either
immediately (when a culture/locale is changed) or later when accessing input
data (non-U.S. character input).
Some functionality problems are detectable as display problems:
Question marks (?) appearing instead of displayed text indicate problems
in Unicode-to-ANSI conversion.
Random High ANSI characters (e.g., ¼, � , ‰, ‡, ¶) appearing
instead of readable text indicate problems in ANSI code using the wrong code
page.
The appearance of boxes, vertical bars, or tildes (default glyphs) [□,
|, ~] indicates that the selected font cannot display some of the
characters.
It might be difficult to find problems in display or print results that
require shaping, layout, or script knowledge. This test is language-specific and
often cannot be executed without language expertise. On the other hand, your
test may be limited to code inspection. If standard text-handling mechanisms are
used to form and display output text, you may consider this area safe.
Another area of potential problems is code that fails to follow local
conventions as defined by the current culture/locale. Make sure your application
displays culture/locale-sensitive data (e.g., numbers, dates, time, currency,
and calendars) according to the current regional settings of your computer.
The Regional Options in Control Panel does not cover all
culture/locale-specific functionality. For example, you cannot see the current
sort order there. Thus, it is important to have a test plan covering all aspects
of functionality related to culture/locale before you start your test.