Success and Failure
Standish Group, Chaos Report, 1999: http://www4.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/lehre/vorlesungen/vse/WS2004/1999_Standish_Chaos.pdf
The best news is that project management is succeeding more often. In 1994, only 16% of application development projects met the criteria for success -- completed on time, on budget and with all the features/functions originally specified. By 1998, 26% of projects were successful.
Standish Group, Collaboration: Development & Management Collaborating on Project Success, By Jim Johnson, Karen D. Boucher, Kyle Connors, and James Robinson: http://www.softwaremag.com/archive/2001feb/CollaborativeMgt.html
Most of these new projects are well within The Standish Group's criteria established in "Recipe for Success, 1998," which limits project duration to six months and project staff to six people. This article is based on information from the company's latest paper, "Extreme CHAOS 2001."
Interview: Jim Johnson of the Standish Group, 2006: http://www.infoq.com/articles/Interview-Johnson-Standish-CHAOS
Includes some summary graphs which Jim uses in his talks, from the 2004 survey.
Programmer Productivity
Programmer Productivity varies 10 to 1 is attributed at http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2008/03/27/productivity-variations-among-software-developers-and-teams-the-origin-of-quot-10x-quot.aspx to
Sackman, H., W.J. Erikson, and E. E. Grant. 1968. "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance." Communications of the ACM 11, no. 1 (January): 3-11.
Steve McConnell's bibliography for this article includes a number of other sources on the topic.