Best way to incorporate spell checkers with a build process

Question

I try to externalize all strings (and other constants) used in any application I write, for many reasons that are probably second-nature to most stack-overflowers, but one thing I would like to have is the ability to automate spell checking of any user-visible strings. This poses a couple problems:

• Not all strings are user-visible, and it's non-trivial to spearate them, and keep that separation in place (but it is possible)
• Most, if not all, string externalization methods I've used involve significant text that will not pass a spell checker such as aspell/ispell (eg: theStrName="some string." and comments)
• Many spellcheckers (once again, aspell/ispell) don't handle many words out of the box (generally technical terms, proper nouns, or just 'new' terminology, like metadata).

How do you incorporate something like this into your build procedures/test suites? It is not feasible to have someone manually spell check all the strings in an application each time they are changed -- and there is no chance that they will all be spelled correctly the first time.

Answer 1

We do it manually, if errors aren't picked up during testing then they're picked up by the QA team, or during localization by the translators, or during localization QA. Then we lodge a bug.

Most of our developers are not native English speakers, so it's not an uncommon problem for us. The number that slip through the cracks is so small that this is a satisfactory solution for us.

Nothing over a few hundred lines is ever 100% bug-free (well... maybe the odd piece of embedded code), just think of spelling mistakes as bugs and don't waste too much time on it.

As soon as your application matures, over 90% of strings won't change between releases and it would be a reasonably trivial exercise to compare two versions of your resources, figure out what'ts new (check them first), what's changed/updated (check next) and what hasn't changed (no need to check these)

So think of it more like I need to check ALL of these manually the first time, and I'm only going to have to check 10% of them next time. Now ask yourself if you still really need to automate spell checking.