Plat_Forms

Introduction Software developers during their work face several fundamental choices with a multitude of options. There are methodological choices, where one selects among possible development processes, and technological choices regarding for instance development tools or base technologies for the software product. While a number of solid research results are available on some methodological topics (such as review or testing techniques), there is hardly any high-quality information on how specific technologies influence development success. There are narrow benchmarking studies comparing the execution performance of, for example, dababase management systems or application servers, there are feature lists comparing the functionality of base technology products, but there are essentially no holistic studies that compare directly how competing technologies shape a realistic product and how that may influence the project. Those few such studies that exist are very small-scale in terms of the system considered, a good example being jccpprt, and despite their small scale some also lack the methodological rigor required for high credibility, a popular example being Kelly's entertaining, yet visibly biased video.