When you release a game in a local market, you want to ensure it works perfectly. Localization testing is essential in the game development life cycle since it ensures that the product is correctly localized and works as intended in the target market.
Like any other testing process, game localization testing may be time-consuming, repetitious, and error-prone, especially when working with many languages and localities. It is time for automation.
Let’s delve deeper into the potential of automation, share some valuable tips, and examine the benefits of automated testing in combining linguistic and functional testing.
What Exactly is Automated Testing?
Automated testing is a software testing technique that assesses software functionality and ensures compliance before it is launched into production. A company can use automated testing to execute specific software tests at a faster rate than human testers. Large or repetitive test cases are better suited for automated testing.
Scripted sequences are run by testing tools in automated software testing. Automated testing tools check the software provided and compare results to previous test runs. An automated test script can be written by a professional localization testing company once and then reused.
An organization can use automated tests for various purposes, including unit, game programming interface (API), and regression testing. The fundamental advantage of automated testing is that it reduces much of the manual effort to a series of scripts.
Writing scripts that validate your game’s functionality from the user’s perspective is what automated functional testing entails. It can assist in ensuring that recent changes introduced no regressions and that your product criteria were met.
Linguistic and Functional Testing Combination
Linguistic game testing largely analyzes a game application’s language-related components, such as text strings, labels, messages, and cultural adaptability. Functional game testing, on the other hand, determines if the program executes its intended tasks correctly. While the goals of these two testing domains are distinct, they are inextricably linked, particularly in systems that rely extensively on languages, such as natural language processing (NLP) software, foreign e-commerce platforms, or multilingual websites.
For the following reasons, combining linguistic and functional testing is critical:
- Understanding culture: Different areas and locales have different linguistic standards, date formats, currencies, and sensitivities. Linguistic testing ensures that your application respects cultural diversity, which improves user engagement and trust.
- User Experience: Games that provide a consistent user experience across multiple languages are more likely to be accepted by a worldwide audience. Language and functionality consistency are critical to assuring user satisfaction.
- Quality Assurance: Functional modifications or updates may bring linguistic difficulties inadvertently. Development teams can detect and fix faults and expenses later in the development process by performing both linguistic and functional testing.
The Benefits of Automated Testing
In the field of linguistic and functional testing, automated testing has emerged as a game changer. Here’s how it comes into play:
1. Reproducibility and Consistency: Automated testing guarantees that linguistic aspects are consistent throughout the application, preventing language and functionality disparities. Automated tests can reliably reproduce the same linguistic settings, reducing human error.
2. Localization Testing: Automation provides for the efficient testing of multiple software language versions. It ensures that translations are precise, contextually relevant, and culturally sensitive, giving you a competitive advantage in the worldwide market.
3. Regression Testing: Automated tests help maintain linguistic integrity throughout the development lifecycle by rapidly identifying any linguistic issues following code modifications.
4. Boundary Testing: Automated tests can provide complete test coverage by carefully assessing how the application handles boundary conditions in terms of text length, unusual characters, and linguistic quirks.
5. Language Data Load Testing: Automated testing can mimic high linguistic data loads for systems involving considerable language processing to evaluate performance under stress.
6. Data-driven Testing: Automation enables data-driven testing of linguistic aspects, allowing systematic testing of numerous linguistic contexts and providing thorough coverage.
7. Usability Testing: Automated technologies can gather and evaluate user interaction data, including language elements, in order to improve the overall user experience by identifying necessary linguistic adjustments.
8. Continuous Integration and Deployment: Integrating automated linguistic testing into the CI/CD pipeline guarantees that linguistic issues are recognized early, minimizing the likelihood that linguistic issues will go unnoticed until later stages of development.
9. Reporting and Feedback: Because automated testing creates detailed information, development and localization teams may easily discover and prioritize linguistic concerns. Continuous improvement requires feedback loops.
10. Efficiency and Scalability: Automation testing is economical and scalable, allowing it to cover a large range of linguistic circumstances quickly and accurately, even in complicated systems.
When and How to Incorporate Automated Testing into Your Release Process
The product’s stability is the most crucial element to consider when incorporating automated testing into your release process. Automation will save you a lot of time and money if you have a consistent set of functional tests that don’t vary much and are run frequently.
However, if your product or feature is still in the early stages of development and big code changes are occurring frequently, it is not yet appropriate to automate. You should wait until the game is more stable.
Summary
Game localization testing assures that the game will function adequately in specific regions, allowing players to enjoy the same ambiance and gameplay as gamers of the original game. The developer can reach a larger audience and boost the game’s chances of success by localizing it.
Combining linguistic and functional testing is critical for delivering high-quality products to a varied and multilingual user base. Automated testing is vital to this approach, assuring linguistic consistency, functionality, and cultural adaptability. Localization testing services may improve the user experience, cut development costs, and remain competitive in an ever-expanding global market by leveraging the power of automation. One of the most important reasons for game translation testing is that it can improve the user experience.
As your game grows in features, extensive manual functional testing becomes difficult, error-prone, wasteful, and time-consuming. Implementing automated testing at various stages of your development process is critical to ensuring that your game meets its specifications and functions as expected.
