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Project Phase Out & Transfer
Project Phase Out & Transfer
Optimizing
software localization
Frank Lin & Boris Gurevich
E
Every company seems to want the utmost In order to be able to react quickly to international market
when it comes to developing and releasing a needs, the management challenged the localization team to come
product. However, the constraints of the project up with a proposal to enhance the current localization projects
management (PM) triangle — speed (time), cost with five goals: vastly improved time-to-market; flexibility to
release multiple languages concurrently; uncompromised product
(resource) and scope (quality) — tell us that one quality; execution under budget; and predictability of schedule.
constraint cannot be changed without affect- What stood in the way? And why did it take so long to bring a
ing the other two. It would take some creative localized version of the product to the market? The initial think-
ing was that the software code was probably not “tight enough”
analyses, initiatives, planning and execution to and translation could “break the code.” Consequently, it would
enhance a process for the lofty goal of “faster, take longer to test and thus the slow speed-to-market. This might
cheaper and better.” make a good argument, but the longer testing time took weeks
or a couple of months, not years, so there were clearly other
Besides addressing the three constraints of PM, however, targeted contributing factors. It was then pointed out that the translation
enhancements of the product itself are essential to a project’s suc- correction cycle could be long — also a valid point. Like regular
cess. This particular product is an automated medication dispensing software defects, the earlier the problems are spotted, the less
system that has been introduced to the market for more than two expensive it is to fix them. More than often, translation issues
decades and is used in the majority of US hospitals. After a long arise during rather than before testing. This could be because of
stint of domestic success, the product was finally localized into a a number of reasons: the large amount of translation, the short
number of languages a few years ago. The localization process was amount of time, quality of source text and quality of instruction
lengthy. This effort was followed by several updates, triggered by given to translators.
functional enhancements to the domestic product. In each itera- A less obvious factor was simply the timing and structur-
tion, for one reason or another, the time-to-market was less than ing of localization projects. Localization projects were often
ideal. In some cases it would take much longer than a year after the chartered and started after domestic release, sometimes almost
product’s domestic release to get all the languages released. seeming like an afterthought. Slow speed-to-market could not
be solved with software and translation improvement
alone. The team brainstormed on the subject of getting
Frank Lin (left) is a software engineering man- to desired state of the projects and identified four gaps:
ager at CareFusion, where he leads international software, PM, testing and translation management.
and domestic software development teams. Software: In the context of this article, localizability
Boris Gurevich is the principal software quality is defined as stability of the software after translation.
engineer at CareFusion with over ten years’ It is more concerned with not losing functionality after
software localization projects experience. localization work is done than with user interface (UI)
Strategies
It is often tempting to simply increase
resources (cost) in the PM triangle and
hope it will address the time and qual-
ity requirements. It can be argued that
in some situations, such as the projects
described here, more resources would not
be the solution, as some of the fundamen-
tal challenges are not resource-related.
To bridge the gaps, the team took an
integrated approach to optimize localization
projects. It operated on the belief that the