All About Globalization Requirements

Overview

Have you ever had to take a product and adapt it to the world market? Have you ever had to gather multilingual software requirements? How can you describe requirements which vary for different locales? Have you ever had a tight budget forcing you to choose which features to implement and which features to defer? Did you face this problem on a global scale?

Requirements are a critical part of any software project and become extremely complex when simultaneously facing the needs of different locales. This workshop shows you how to systematically approach requirement management for software projects independent of your development process.

The workshop walks you through all phases of a requirement life cycle including elicitation, elaboration, workflow, prioritization, development, testing, deployment and support. Several real life examples from successful globalization projects are covered. You will take home tools, templates and techniques that you can use right away!

Target Audience

This course is intended for executives, testing and development managers, internationalization directors, localization managers, program and project managers, marketing product and requirement managers, and translation agencies and translators.

Benefits

This workshop will help you understand how locale specific requirements are implemented, add globalization requirement management to established workflows, gain insight into organizational impact of software globalization, describe, prioritize, manage, deploy and support globalization requirements in each locale.

Duration

The agenda described below is for a one-day session.

Pre-requisites

None.

Agenda

  1. An Introduction to Global Requirements
    • Why are requirements so important?
    • Requirement economics: the cost of bad requirements
    • A generic model of internationalization
  2. Globalization Requirements Basics
    • Requirements concepts
    • Product Development Processes: waterfall, spiral, agile
    • Localization, simship and agile development
    • The globalization dimensions: locale, language, country
    • Requirements lifecycle
    • Standards & Tools
  3. Requirements Prioritization and Classification
    • Roles and responsibilities, country managers vs. central managers
    • Requirements scope: global vs. regional vs. local
    • Tips how to prioritize global requirements
  4. Requirements Elicitation
    • Techniques to elicit global requirements: Interviewing, questionnaires, observation, document study, and prototyping
    • Finding locale-specific requirements
    • Finding missing requirements
  5. Requirements Elaboration
    • Use cases
    • Scenarios
    • Databases and spreadsheets
    • Global requirements meta-spec
  6. Defining Globalization Requirements
    • Writing for Translation: colors, attributes, indexes, synonyms, …
    • Unicode and encodings
    • Languages, locales, locale negotiation, locale tiers
    • Messaging: concatenation, text expansion, context, audience
    • Formatting: numbers, currency, date, time, calendars,…
    • Text processing: sorting, searching, wrapping, …
    • UI design: alignment, layout, fonts, colors, images, address forms
    • Measurement systems, page sizes
    • Language-specific issues: reading fields, dual sorts, bidi issues, …
    • Local laws: privacy, banking, taxes; USA law on encryption key size, …
  7. Getting Started
    • Basic steps
    • Resources: tools, books, links

Handouts

Each attendee will receive:

  • A 200+ page booklet, with ample room for notes, complete with table of contents and glossary. The booklet is designed to serve as a practical easy-to-use reference “book” for regular use during an internationalization project.
  • A 10-page globalization requirements checklist, to serve as starting point for defining globalization requirements.

Matta Saikali

About our Instructor – Matta Saikali

Matta has more than 25 years' experience in internationalization and localization testing. His testing experience covers more than 30 languages including European, Asian, Arabic, Hindi, etc.

Formerly Director of Software Quality Assurance at Gemplus, Matta built up and managed a team of 50+ SQA professionals responsible for testing globalized Windows applications and mobile devicesin European and Asian languages.

As Director of SQA at Purkinje, Matta managed the testing team for a multilingual multi-user client-server application for clinical data entry.

Matta was also SQA team leader at ALIS where he was involved in testing all ALIS products, notably their Arabic/Farsi product line.

Additionally, Matta holds a B. Sc. and M. Sc. in Electrical Engineering.

 
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