Enterprise Library Test Guide - Willy .Net

Testing for Globalization Best
Practices
Globalization best practices ensure that the application code can support multiple
cultures with little or no change to the code base. A culture is a combination of a
language and a cultural environment. It includes information such as the format
of dates and times, currencies, character classification, and sorting rules for strings.
One globalization best practice is to separate the culture-dependent content from the
culture-independent content. Another best practice is to write code that can process
any culture-dependent content. This ensures that the application can be easily localized
for a particular culture.
Tests for globalization best practices detect problems in the application’s design that
violate these practices. The tests should prove that the code can handle any cultural
convention without incurring any difficulties that would either cause data loss or
display problems.
This chapter discusses how the Enterprise Library application blocks were tested to
see whether they followed globalization best practices.
The Test Approach
The test approach is the overall procedure that the test teams followed to ensure that
the application blocks adhered to globalization best practices.
To test the application blocks
1. Create a test plan that consists of test cases that show whether the application
blocks follow globalization best practices.
2. Design pseudo-localization tests to find localizability bugs.
3. Choose a test environment by deciding on the operating system and the culture of
the server that hosts the application blocks.
4. Execute the test cases and pseudo-localization tests and analyze the results to
ensure that the application blocks do not lose the data or incorrectly display the
data.