[necovek]

Unfortunately, it's hard to be put into a position where you can apply one, let alone multiple new approaches to software development on a team developing a large application for a long time (say at least 2 years). You'll have team churn, you'll have requirements churn, you'll have understanding of methodologies and practical realities change, etc.

So by "testing their (opinions)", I usually understand people to mean that they've been on a project where they've enjoyed working on something in a particular way (people always underestimate what someone is simply enjoying doing, I have no idea why). I understand that almost nobody is able to compare and contrast two significantly different approaches, let alone establish things like incident rates or cost of improvement and such resulting from application of those approaches (because there's no reference point).

What we do need is for all developers to contribute to setting up a foundation dedicated to establishing software development methodology quality, and then have that set up a dozen teams of 4-8 engineers working on a dozen longish problems (6-36 months) with different methodologies, and then aggregate and analyze results in 12 years. All the engineers would have market-rate salaries, so we'd all have to be chipping in monthly :D

I mean, just imagine where we'd be if we've done that in 2010? (probably at the same place, but just maybe not!)