Jon Kern, an aerospace engineer in the 1990s, became increasingly frustrated with these long lead times and with the decisions made early in a project that couldn't be changed later. "We were looking for something that was more timely and responsive," he notes, joining a growing number of those who felt that there had to be a better way to build software. He was one of 17 software thought leaders who started meeting informally and talking about ways to develop software more simply, without the process and documentation overhead of waterfall and other popular software engineering techniques of the time.