Most of products we roll out from software factories are initially targeted to limited /targeted customer base who are located in certain geographical region. So product managers are initially tend to forget the i18n requirements they have to meet down the line. So when final time comes to internationalize the product, many a times we find that design of the system is so rigid that it needs to be redesigned. The whole execrcise of design plus development and testing takes considerable amount of time and effort. I have seen certain cases where it took more than a year’s effort with 100+ team . This can be easily avoided if we factor in i18n requirement which product may need to meet down the line. This doesn’t mean that we should have full fledged design for i18n but we should have enough hook points or build that flexibility where we can plugin those pieces when time comes. I have done this in one of enterprise platform and later on we have saved considerable amount of time and resources…all translates into dollars…..
