You could start by finding a corporate sponsor with a lot of developers and a vested interest in finding out which methods will be best for them. The advantage of that being that you could even test it on a real project (the sponsor would "just" need to be willing to dedicate twice the number of developers to a suitably small project).

It'd still not be easy, and of course there'd still be issues (e.g. is there anything about the corporate culture or training in that company that would affect the result?), but it'd still be far better than a bunch of students and toy problems.