It occurs to me that you might be able to actually run real tests, with real engineers.
Say you're in Iowa or Kansas or somewhere. You can probably hire software engineers, with 5 to 10 years experience, for $100K/year, maybe even less. Hire 10 of them, for two years. That's $2 million.
Assign them to random teams. Give them non-trivial projects that run, say, three months each. That gives you eight experiments you can run. Change the methodology, or the language, or whatever you're trying to study.
You say that you can't get funding for a $2 million experiment? Tell Microsoft, and Oracle, and IBM, and the federal government, that the things you learn will enable them to more efficiently create software. See if they'll fund at least part of it.
Say you're in Iowa or Kansas or somewhere. You can probably hire software engineers, with 5 to 10 years experience, for $100K/year, maybe even less. Hire 10 of them, for two years. That's $2 million.
Assign them to random teams. Give them non-trivial projects that run, say, three months each. That gives you eight experiments you can run. Change the methodology, or the language, or whatever you're trying to study.
You say that you can't get funding for a $2 million experiment? Tell Microsoft, and Oracle, and IBM, and the federal government, that the things you learn will enable them to more efficiently create software. See if they'll fund at least part of it.