Automated internationalization andlocalization testing of GUIs

• Sinan Arnaut

Nowadays most of the software available on the market utilizes GUI (graphical user interface), as it allows for more user-friendly interaction as well as more reasons to include automated testing procedures for GUIs. GUIs tend to be error-prone, especially as regards localization. This means that each of the products needs to be internationalized and localized for it to meet the requirements and standards of the targeted market. However, many applications are delivered with localization issues which are not discovered during the testing. The problem is that testing is mostly done manually. In the case of industrial applications for everyday use, manual testing is inefficient, time-consuming, and costly. Testing for localization issues adds another level of complexity to the problems brought about by manual testing. There are very few reports of real-time approaches with empirical results for automated localization testing. In this paper, we describe the approach which was applied to a real-time industrial application and a demo application of automated localization testing. The results of the test run for both applications have been collected and a report was created for four major bug categories, which are defined in our approach: spelling mistakes, wrong language, truncated text, and encoding errors.