Everybody knows that modern design methodologies, such as OOD, use cases, UML, level certification, ISO 9000, etc. are essential to producing good software.
Unfortunately, everybody also knows that software still ships late full of bugs, still has feature bloat, still is frustrating to use, and still fails a disturbing amount of the time.
Does anybody know of evidence that the modern formalisms actually deliver the goods? I’m looking for anything, so long as it can be evaluated by a third party, including the following:
1) Quantitative studies doing real statistics.
2) Per-project descriptions (e.g. Front Page was developed with set A of methodologies, while DreamWeaver was developed with set B).
3) Per-company descriptions(e.g. Microsoft is certified at Level X and does this, while Adobe is certified at Level Y and does that and the other).