Plat_Forms: Contests as an alternative approach to SE empirical studies in industry

Plat_Forms is a set of three studies that search for process and product properties emerging from the use of specific web development platforms. Its first key property is the use of a contest format; this leads to easier, broader, and more uniform data collection compared to on-site industrial studies. As a second key property, the three instances do not merely serve to extend or corroborate each others´ results, they also serve as a time series for characterizing changes in the underlying software development reality over the course of a few years - an important aspect that has received little attention in empirical software engineering research so far.