Globalization and the Japanese Software Industry
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Infosys delivers concept-to-market software engineering services across the engineering value chain. Our blog will discuss the latest trends in software product engineering, outsourcing, technologies, and address business challenges.
February 03, 2010
January 28, 2010
Internationalization and Performance considerations
Almost always, during the design discussion of any Internationalization project, one of the questions asked by the client is, “So, will Internationalization have any impact on the performance of the application?”. No matter what you think, there is no denying the fact that Internationalization does have a performance impact on the application, whether it is big or small. There may be situations where the business benefits of Internationalization will outweigh the performance criteria and in such situations it makes sense to go ahead with Internationalization even at the cost of some amount of performance degradation. However a good design can help you in avoiding severe performance hits.
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January 11, 2010
Is Big Bang the right approach to Internationalization?
Over the years our project teams have matured in the way they handle the implementation of an Internationalization project, however things were not always so smooth. There were times when the project was tested and delivered to the client, but it refused to work on the client’s machines. The offshore team just couldn’t figure out the reason for this to happen. A lot of fire fighting effort was then required to get things back on track and take corrective actions. Most of the problems were due to wrong planning, lack of technical understanding and incorrect assumptions. Things are pretty much streamlined now with an i18n Center of Excellence (CoE), i18n frameworks, analysis tools, POC’s and best practices in place. Here I am going to recollect my earliest Internationalization experience and what we learnt from it.
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December 31, 2009
Deciding Optimal Unicode Solution for Globalization Database
The concept of Globalization and the estimation model has been explained very well by Aviraj Singh in his post Effort estimation for a Globalization project. Being a database person I always look at it from a different perspective, giving a bit extra weightage to database. There are lots of granular intricacies that one has to think of before deciding the solution for supporting Unicode data in databases. It can be achieved though Unicode database i.e. Upgrading database character set to one that supports UTF-8 encoded characters as SQL datatypes like CHAR/VARCHAR2 etc. Another option can be Unicode Datatype i.e. to support multilingual data only for certain columns by using Unicode national character set to store multilingual data in SQL NCHAR datatype attributes , without making any changes to database character set. The most confusing and key decision for Globalization project is whether one should opt for Unicode database or Unicode data types for supporting multiple languages in database. This is a key decision for the success of any Globalization project and will also have a considerable impact on effort estimations. An incorrect choice at this stage can lead to a lot of rework and end hour surprises.
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December 11, 2009
Don’t think local, think locale
Imagine yourself going to Japan to open a restaurant. Your market research says that your burgers are going to sell like hot cakes there, so you have planned a major investment there and drawn up plans for expansions. You land at the Narita airport and are absolutely clueless on how to get out of there. You look around and find that all directions and signs in Japanese. You try to ask for directions but all you get is blank stares because no one understands English. Somehow you manage to find your way out and get busy with your work. After a lot of hard work, you finally open your restaurant but you don’t find many people walking in. Your business goes dry and it’s difficult to survive with so much local competition around. What is really going wrong? Didn’t your market research say that you are bound to succeed?
November 25, 2009
Internationalization and the development life cycle
As a product company your team has come up with a brilliant concept which has tremendous marketing potential in your country. Your marketing survey shows that the concept will soon catch up with other countries across the globe and you can capture the overseas market too. The only catch is that the product will be required to be globalized before it is launched in the international markets. A global launch is still 5-6 months away, so what product strategy will you adopt? Develop the product in English and later when you have access to the global markets, think of internationalizing it or start developing an internationalized version of the product right from conceptualization stage so that you are ready to penetrate the global markets when the time comes? This is a question most product managers will face while developing a product.
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November 11, 2009
Effort estimation for a Globalization project
Effort estimation is the first step to undertaking any software project and a Globalization project is no different. Effort estimation for a product or application which needs to be Globalized follows more or less the same estimation principles as regular maintenance projects, yet there are no defined methods specifically for estimating the amount of I18N or L10N changes required. While working on the proposal for a Globalization project for one of our clients we were faced with the dilemma of adopting standard methodologies like SMC based estimation, FP based estimation etc or trying to create a hybrid and come up with our own estimation model which follows the same estimation principles but is more tailored for globalization projects. Finally we came up with a raw estimation model which was fine tuned over time and gave us estimates which were statistically inline with the results from other maintenance projects.
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July 08, 2009
The Encoding Dilemma
Have you ever got involved in an Internationalization related project and faced a very basic question, “Which encoding should I use in my application?” I have come across this question several times and have realized that I still don’t have a simple and straightforward answer to this question. There are a lot of factors which need to be considered while going with a particular encoding and that choice might be the crucial factor which determines the success or failure of the project. Choosing the wrong encoding for the product, might result in severe performance issues which might ultimately cost a lot in terms of rework, delayed product launches or even loss in market share.
June 05, 2009
Globalization of Software in a Flat World
These days you will see numerous articles on how the world is becoming “Flat” and how the playing field is getting leveled. Inspired by Nandan Nilekeni’s quote, Thomas Friedman has written an entire book on this topic. Quoting Friedman “Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.”
All this wouldn’t have been possible without the advancement in technology. In today’s times, businesses are not restricted to any single city, country or continent. The reach of services or products is expanding across the globe and the user base is forever increasing. In such a business scenario where the users or consumers belong to diverse cultures, speak and understand different languages, it is becoming imperative to produce software and offer services which cater to the globalized world.
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