Static analysis tools are useful for quickly identifying issues with your code. Recently, my team has been evaluating Globalyzer, a static analysis tool for finding software internationalization issues. Globalyzer will find such issues as hard coded strings, or hard coded date/time formats. Our aim is to move the discovery of I18N issues from the localization QA phase, upstream to the development phase.
My first impressions are good. Globalyzer is quick to setup, easy to use, and scans code unbelievably quickly. I’ve scanned a project with 350,000 lines of code in less than a minute.
The key to an effective rollout of Globalyzer is developing rule sets per product. Rule sets essentially define the scanning criteria for a code base. For example, for a C++ project, we would start with the built in rule set for C++. Then after an initial scan, we analyze the results, and we may want to update the rule set. For example, we may want to configure the rule set to ignore calls to any logging functions, since we don’t localize log messages.
I’m hoping that we get the following usage from Globalyzer:
- Globalyzer should help us get involved earlier in the development cycle.
- Lots has been written about Agile localization. Globalyzer should help us certify sprints as I18N ready, for later localization.
- We should find any serious I18N issues early in the project – thus reducing fire-fighting later on.
Longer term, I’d like for us to look at integrating Globalyzer with our build systems. I’ll be posting here periodically on our progress, and my experiences with using static analysis tools to find code level internationalization issues.