As more companies deploy software products world wide software testing must change to verify products on non-English operating systems. The Global Verification Test (GVT) addresses these testing issues.

A global verification test is a portion of the product functional verification test (FVT) that addresses Internationalization (I18N) issues. This test assures the product can run in non-US environments and after translation. The goal of this test is to certify that a product is ready for world-wide distribution.

Since it would be a near impossibility to verify all language versions of all operating systems it is not practical to run a full GVT of a product in all environments. GVT testing incorporates the use of specialised tools to verify functions in different environments.

Some of the techniques include verification through execution, mock translation environments and scanning tools. Verification through execution involves running the un-translated application on selected foreign language operating systems to verify specific functional support such as bi-directional language support, Unicode character set support or multibute character set support for platforms that do not yet support Unicode.

Third Party Source Scanning Tools these tools search source code for potential I18N problems. These segments of code are then analysed for potential and corrected.

Mock Translation tools are several pseudo-languages and mock locales which disclose problems undetectable by code scanning tools (e.g. data formatting, field expansion, column misalignment, line truncation, etc.).