Attendees should have an understanding of QA and testing procedures. For the linguistic portions of the presentation, previous experience would be beneficial, but not a prerequisite.

Abstract:

As the Asian market, primarily mainland China continues to open its doors of opportunity to western business, many service and hardware manufacturers will find that their need for Asian testing will sharply increase. With the prospects of new opportunities looming on the horizon, many would be providers may also find that their first experience into Asia to be ripe with obstacles and pitfalls. These difficulties stem from differences not just in how software is encoded, but also in key linguistic and cultural differences within a given market. Many western businesses underestimate the power of the Asian market prior to taking their first step.

The presentation is focused on the things that a company needs to evaluate prior to creating a services testing plan for Asian languages. The paper intends to divide the focus between both technical issues (encoding standards, tools available and test scrip preparation) and linguistic and cultural issues. By presenting language dependent information, the paper will help to educate the conference attendee on linguistic and layout issues that must be identified as part of a proper test plan.

The intended audience for this paper will be managers or PM's who have influence or involvement in the localization of a product or the testing of the localized version.

The main part of the presentation shows how various Asian testing problems can be avoided. It discusses the requirements for creating a proper test plan that covers both functional, linguistic and cultural testing. This paper will also explore compatibility issues for porting test plans to different markets that share a common language (ie, Chinese). Provided during the presentation will be real world experiences from companies that have attempted to launch products into China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Additionally, during the presentation, the presenter can also speak to issues regarding the other countries that make up SE Asia.