Thursday, October 27, 2011

Testing the application displayed in Chinese (中國)

One of the reason I am the software tester is the need to learn something new everyday. For every new project there may be different testing missions, different stakeholders, different technologies - different project context. My latest project was completely different from previous because user names were displayed in local alphabets - eg. Chinese. It was great that I've had the opportunity to learn new alphabet. After couple days I was able to spot some character patterns however I have also realized that I can not see problems in places where I were not looking for. It seemed that it was much easier and faster to test when user names were presented in English. When I complained about this to one of my colleague he suggested to translate those names to more readable format and thanks to this we've found FoxReplace.
"This tool lets you replace text in web pages. You can define a substitution list and apply it automatically or at your own discretion, or make individual substitutions."

Fortunately e-mail addresses of our Chinese users were stored in database using English alphabet, I created substitution list where for each name written with Chinese characters I could assign replacement name based on email login eg. '亞歷山大' -> 'Alexander'.



Thanks to this substitution list I was able to replace all names on the page and easily find (and remember) any user name I was looking for.



Alek

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