> often failed in order-of-magnitude ways

so, there should be lots of examples, right? References?

these folks were the first to push CASE tools, which are a footnote in software history because they failed rather completely in actual production usage. they invented COCOMO, which never gets used for the easy reason of routine order-of-magnitude margins of error (60% in studies, 600% in practice...). they were the biggest pushers or UML and graphical programming, which dies and lives again and again in increasingly zombified states...

have a dealie about cocomo specifically, I suppose. http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2016/05/19/cocomo...