Kshitij Gupta works with Adobe Systems in the role of Computer Scientist for globalization team. During his tenure of eight years at Adobe, he has led the translation technology team for the development of tools and workflows to constantly make globalization process efficient and robust.

Kshitij is a regular speaker at Adobe in-house technology talks and delivered a well-received hands-on tutorial at ‘Adobe Tech Summit’. His paper on “Attacking Globalized Software – and preventing it!” was selected for the Unicode conference IUC-36.

He also presented a session on “Localization, the efficient way to do it!” at TLC 2014.

Kshitij Gupta

will present

Going global? Let’s measure your product for World-readiness!

Abstract

Is your product ready for the global audience? Is string translation the only requirement you would need to cater to when you plan to go global? How would you efficiently measure your product’s world-readiness? What all parameters should you measure your product on, before planning go-to market for global audience?

Web/mobile applications are becoming more prevalent and world-readiness goals need to change accordingly. Software applications now have faster iterations and quick releases. Localization of a product in short cycles at times is a challenge in itself; in absence of an appropriate mechanism to measure the scoring mechanism, focusing on improvements in localization aspects is next to impossible.

Just 38% of the world population speak English; for the rest 78%, the software requires more than just string translation. Such requirements include, but are not limited to, locale awareness in terms of calendar inputs, collation capabilities, currencies, measurement units; localizability in terms of UI auto layout, resource externalization etc.; multi lingual architecture and multi-lingual text support.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. One needs the ability to measure product’s world-readiness to set improvement goals and to evaluate feasibility for go-to–market for a geography. At Adobe, we developed a framework to measure Adobe products on World-readiness score to help manage and plan global market feasibility better. The framework categorizes all globalization parameters into meaningful verticals, assigns relative weights and provides guidelines on expected behavior, testing procedures and implementation basics. On basis of collective score for a product, its globalization goals for the next release are set.

In the session, we would like to discuss this framework with audience at length, discussion in detail, for multiple platforms, the expected behaviors, examples, relative importance of such parameters and the challenges encountered while resolving respective globalization issues and how the framework enables one to rightly grade the products on world-readiness and set improvement goals. Along with discussion, we would have a live hands-on score evaluation of a sample product using the mentioned framework.