Basically, dealing with the "software crisis" is what we now call software engineering. We just see the field more clearly now.
What this crisis was all about is that in the early days of the modern technological era -- in the 1950s, say -- there was tremendous optimism about the effect that digital computers could have on society, on their ability to literally solve humanity's problems. We just needed to formalize important questions and let our hulking "digital brains" come up with the answers.
Artificial intelligence, for example, had some early successes in easy to formalize domains like chess and these sorts of successes led to lots of people who should have known better making extremely naive predictions about how soon perfect machine translation would transform human interaction and how soon rote and onerous work would be relegated to the dustbin of history by autonomous intelligent machines.
