Plat_Forms 2011 - 3 weeks later...

Looking back at the Plat_Forms contest on January 18th and 19th, we can proudly say that it was a huge success. The feedback we received was overall positive with just a little criticism here and there, mostly regarding the interviews we conducted during the contest.

In the aftermath of Plat_Forms 2011 Matt Strout from the Shadowcat team (Perl) and Paul Johnson from the Perl Ecosystem Group team (guess what platform ), wrote about their Plat_Forms experience. Matt's article is called "Plat_Forms redux", Paul's "Perl Ecosystem Group - looking back a week later". Both consist of large bits of technical considerations as well as general observations regarding methodology and their Plat_Forms participation in whole.

The TYPO3 Association team even went so far as to put their solution online for everyone to play with: http://media.netlogix.de/news-details/artikel/plat-forms-2011-results-of-the-flow3-team-online.

In the meantime we, that is Lutz Prechelt, our students Alexander, Daniel and Christophe and myself have begun to analyse the data. While our technics people are importing the solutions into our VMWare infrastructure - one team delivered a VirtualBox image, D'oh! - we started evaluating the activity interviews. We can't tell much, yet, aside from that it's a lot of data to be evaluated - 1598 MP3 files in total.

What we can give you though is a graph showing the distribution of the numbers of questions the customer has been asked by platform. We haven't verified the data with our other data sources yet, so it may contain errors and change slightly over the course of the evaluation.

Note that for JavaScript there was only 1 team and only 3 teams for Perl while all other platforms had 4 teams.

In the coming months we will provide you with some bits of our evaluation like the above graph. We won't draw conclusions until we have evaluated all data and written our results report but you will have a chance to participate in our progress.

We want to thank all participating teams, our sponsors, the OSBF and the iX magazine for making Plat_Forms 2011 a successful event. We hope to see some of you again next year for Plat_Forms 2012!