Comment by doctorleff

I taught these issues several times in the graduate Software Engineering Course. Good resources are the Standish Report:

https://www.csus.edu/indiv/v/velianitis/161/chaosreport.pdf

Also, anything that T. Capers Jones wrote. The most comprehensive one of these books is this:

Estimating Software Costs: Bringing Realism to Estimating Hardcover ISBN-13978-0071483001

Many believe the official recognition of the crisis in developing software were the two NATO conferences in 1968 and 1969.

See the Wikipedia article on the History of Software Engineering.

There have been two small scale experimental comparisons of the waterfall formal model (requirements, design, code, test) and the more prototyping and agile method. They seem to have the same productivity in terms of lines per programmer-month but the formal method tends to produce larger software.