For a product to be world-ready, the whole design, development, and QA process must be globalized. Consequently, QA will need to modify its processes, requiring that all design documents, practices, and procedures be world-ready. This paper describes how the challenges of globalization can be addressed by a test team, at the organizational level and in the way basic functionality is verified. Proper organization of the test process will help to produce software that can be simultaneously released on multiple language markets and localized to many languages. The solution that builds a single process for creation of multiple language versions of a product include:

• Globalization of the functional test - modification of functionality testing to cover the multilingual capabilities of text handling and locale-sensitive functionality
• Adding a localizability test pass: this verifies that the UI of the program being tested can be translated to any target language without code modifications. Localizability simplifies the task of localizers and reduces the complexity of testing localized versions of the product
• Localization testing, which checks how well the build has been translated into a particular target language. Based on the results of globalized testing, this test should focus on things that are altered during localization, such as the UI and content files, and be less technical and more linguistic.

This approach was successfully used by several teams at Microsoft, raging in size from tiny to gigantic. This makes us think the solution may be applicable to almost any software product.