The problem is one of cost. The tea tasting experiment is very easy to reproduce and very cheap to run. Reproducing, say, the development process of Myna is pra

The problem is one of cost. The tea tasting experiment is very easy to reproduce and very cheap to run. Reproducing, say, the development process of Myna is practically impossible not to mention the prohibitive cost of finding devs as awesome as Dave and I ;-) To apply the scientific method to software development you need to apply methods from the social sciences. Now I don't know a great deal about these, but I do know you need lots of data which is very hard to find. The typical solution is test hypotheses on undergrad students, because that is what the experimenters have plentiful access to. The problem, which is also apparent in psychology, is generalising these results beyond this group. Are the experiences of 2nd year undergrads using Java for a 2 week project predictive of developers with 10+ years experience working on a year long project? One can reasonably argue they are not.