Supporting Swift Cyber Business Ramp Ups Around the World with Translation and Localization Sped by CD
Smartling technology enables the business to quickly translate content in websites, apps, and documents into any language in the world. “We streamline all the non-linguistic work associated with the translation,” says Andrey Akselrod, CTO / Co-Founder, Smartling, a translation management platform provider for localization anywhere, globally. Using the Smartling platform, companies upload content, making it instantly accessible by a Smartling translator partner or a translator that the company acquires independently.
I viewed the Smartling demo and I can tell you that the platform offers many innate, seamless, intuitive abilities. Briefly, it allows the translator to largely automate translation, localization, and content re-use and editing against a backdrop of how it will appear on a website, in an app, and in electronic documents. The platform includes workflow automations to speed translation along to the next stage in the project. “This allows for a reduction in complexity, cost, and time for the translation process, without sacrificing the high-quality translation that only a human can do,” says Akselrod.
The TDD Testing Secret Sauce
Smartling developers first write automated regression tests for the code they are about to create. Then they confidently code their software knowing how the tests will challenge the code because they wrote the tests themselves AND did so before they wrote the new feature or innovation. This process accelerates development because the programmers write the code knowing what it takes to ensure that it won’t break anything. This enables Smartling to deploy live code as many as ten times per day, according to Akselrod.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) saves on refactoring and validates the tests. Smartling discovered this when certain test and development issues disappeared after they moved to TDD. When you code the tests after writing the software that you need to test, you may have to refactor your code so that it is suitable for testing. “You find yourself in a position of doing refactoring without tests to validate that the code still works,” says Akselrod. There’s an old carpenter’s saying that you should “measure twice and cut once” to make sure you don’t waste what you cut or have to cut again. But this sounds like the reverse, expecting the coder to cut (code) twice and then measure. The absurdity in that is self-evident.
Developers who must create tests after they innovate their software don’t test whether the tests could fail. “This results in low-quality tests. We’ve discovered this the hard way—we had pretty good test coverage, but a number of bugs in the code base led us to discover that our tests were failing,” says Akselrod. TDD resolved all this, saving time, energy, and investment, and satisfying customers.
Though these automated tests run much faster than manual regression tests do, Smartling gauges test performance over time and refines testing efficiencies to ensure that tests keep pace with accelerating deployments. “We distribute test execution among multiple servers to make sure that the tests run as quickly as possible,” says Akselrod.
Can Get Enough of That TDD
Developers find themselves obsessed with the TDD development process for the prompt props they receive as they deploy code directly rather than wait to see it run successfully. “TDD makes for quick customer feedback. Customers are thrilled because we react to their requests quickly. This fosters an exciting and fulfilling conversation between developers and customers,” adds Akselrod.
TDD’s competitive advantage wets the appetite for market penetration. TDD moves Smartling through the OODA decision cycle at an accelerated rate. “Modern software development cycles through an OODA loop such that developers Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. If your OODA loop is faster than your competitor’s is, you win,” says Akselrod. TDD enables Smartling to rapidly deploy, respond to the customer base, and instantiate innovations, expediting aggressive market growth.
Results
Customers are seizing the benefits that savvy platform provider Smartling serves. As this throng of growing businesses increasingly hitches its wagons to Smartling, Smartling in turn sees three-billion page views per month in traffic flowing through its Global Delivery Network of translated dynamic pages, according to Akselrod. No matter how you slice it, three-billion is a number you simply cannot explain away.
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