Shifting Left: Moving
the productivity pendulum focus within globalization.
It should be no surprise then when I repeat a common theme
we hear not only during from our visit, but from customers in general: Enterprises
now want to investigate with greater vigor how to expand, or shift, their focus
from localization-only productivity gains to streamlined internationalization
(i18n) processes and compliance within software development.
Globalization, within the context of software, is often
defined as internationalization and localization. By shifting the emphasis left,
the focus places greater importance on ensuring software code is i18n compliant
before localization and QA, and not after as is currently often the case. Companies
are beginning to understand the cost/benefit analysis beyond localization
productivity by reducing the number of costly l10n/testing iterations, ad-hoc
testing, i18n bug fixing and delays to international revenue.
It makes inherent sense to me. Productivity gains have been
tremendous in the world of localization. The industry has responded with
solutions for the different types of content enterprises produce (web, KB’s,
manuals, legal, etc.) and industry growth has been awesome. I don’t see in my
crystal ball however any major innovations beyond better use of technology currently
being explored, so the time to shift efforts left and explore the little
understood world of i18n on localization, is now.
There are real costs associated to i18n bugs, which I didn’t know
before I joined Lingoport. A common estimate is that a i18n bug for an
organization supporting 20+ languages costs
about $500. How about the extra resources required to fix them versus the
delay on international revenue versus lack of resources for new product
features and enhancements? It’s not easy to always quantify, but if you did as
some customers of ours have done, you’d be very surprised at the money being
spent.
Consider another perspective. A customer recently told me
something to this affect: “It's not just about
ROI metrics. It's being able to understand our own business, internal customers
(developer/product teams) and proactively solve problems."
The challenge faced by Globalization Departments is that
software development is, almost without exception, not an activity that falls
under their responsibility. Managing localization activities certainly is. Localization
groups often receive content and resource files, localize, QA, report and
deliver. In an Agile environment, they set schedules and align resources to
meet iterations and schedules.
Rarely do they have influence, however, on how software
developers create software, which environments they work in, or authority to
force i18n guidelines on developers around the world on how to treat locale-sensitive
methods, functions or classes in various programming languages. Some companies
are successful in instituting some i18n process or awareness during development.
Making i18n compliance a reality through many iterative QA cycles and releases
is simply not efficient.
So what is a company to do? Here are some ideas on how you
can start to shift left:
- Monitor internationalization status and activities over time and provide visibility on the number and type of i18n bugs your organization faces across products and groups. Calculate the cost of i18n bugs. Derive the workflow to find, fix and deliver bug fixes, from the hours your team member spends to fix them, to vendor costs, to delays in international revenue or product development. It will get the attention of senior management.
- Implement a tool and process that scans and evaluates the code provided from software development for i18n compliance before it goes to localization. Track the number of errors found and repeat #2.
- Provide reports, either in Waterfall or Agile environments, on the type of errors and where they can be found in the source code for development to re-take responsibility for i18n
- Provide a plug-in to the IDE of your software developers, such as Eclipse. It can alert them to i18n errors in real-time and greatly reduce QA and testing, as well as steps #3 and #4.
To summarize, the time maybe ripe for the localization
industry to spread its wings and become true globalization groups in their
respective enterprises. The past ten years have focused on optimizing processes
and establishing localization workflows, both on the client and vendor-side, for all types of files,
content and customer interactions. But the enabler of localization, that being
internationalization, has been pushed to the wayside. Possible causes could be
because it’s complicated, its expensive, it’s hard to do and “we don’t own
it.” But by taking on this challenge, it may just propel globalization stature,
importance and visibility within the enterprise and industry as not seen
before, something localization professionals have always wanted.