[thewebcount]

I agree with most of what you say, but this strikes me as wrong:

> We have people falling all over themselves to sing the praises of XP, TDD, Agile/Scrum/etc, and yet, we can't show software actually getting any better.

Software is absolutely better today than it was in the 80s and 90s. I used to have to reboot my computer 2 or 3 times a day due to unrecoverable crashes and taught myself to constantly save work after every minor change. Now my computer stays up for weeks to months at a time only being rebooted to install updates occasionally. Documents are often autosaved, and I don't even need to save anything when I quit an app. The next time I launch it's all there.

I agree that we may not be able to measure that any given methodology is better than any other one, but we've made significant progress along the way. Better tooling, like static analyzers and profilers have helped, too. I do think automated testing can be shown to improve things when used appropriately. (The drive for 100% test coverage seems fanatical to me, though.)