I founded my first company in 1997 and soon realized that software development projects were never delivered on time and on budget. Much of the difficulties came from the burdens of traditional code: crafting it by hand was a very time-consuming activity reserved for elite professionals who could easily be needed in a different project, or simply quit their job, leaving others to understand what they had coded.

Additionally, traditional waterfall methodologies used to fail because the business changed during the project, forcing a redesign of the architecture that crossed over databases, business rules, front ends, and integrations. Adapting the dependencies of all that code further delayed the projects. 2+ year projects became 3 year projects, 3 year projects got further extended. CIOs had to face the hard reality that a lot of big projects either got canceled or were delivered below business expectations already carrying a large backlog of highly expensive changes.