The software crisis was a term used in the early days of software engineering, before it was a well-established subject. The term was used to describe the impact of rapid increases in computer power and the complexity of the problems which could be tackled. In essence, it refers to the difficulty of writing correct, understandable and verifiable computer programs. The roots of the software crisis are complexity, expectations, and change. Software engineering (SE) is the profession concerned with creating and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, engineering, application domains, and other fields. ...

Conflicting requirements have always hindered the software development process. For example, while users demand a large number of features, customers generally want to minimise the amount they must pay for the software and the time required for its development.

The notion of a software crisis emerged at the end of the 1960s. An early use of the term is in Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture, "The Humble Programmer" (EWD340), published in the Communications of the ACM. Dijkstra states: Portrait of Edsger Dijkstra (courtesy Brian Randell) Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Rotterdam, May 11, 1930 – Nuenen, August 6, 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. ... Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the flagship monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery. ...

"[The major cause of the software crisis is] that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem." Edsger Dijkstra: The Humble Programmer (PDF, 473Kb) (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF)

The causes of the software crisis were linked to the overall complexity of the software process and the relative immaturity of software engineering as a profession. The crisis manifested itself in several ways:
- Projects running over-budget.
- Projects running over-time.
- Software was of low quality.
- Software often did not meet requirements.
- Projects were unmanageable and code difficult to maintain.

The software crisis was addressed by the implemenation of various [processes and methodologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development#Processes_and_methodologies)] most notibly Royce's waterfall model.