Importance of Business Domain Understanding

As a "dweeb", I love learning about new technologies. New programming languages, new frameworks, new Open Source tools. I love talking with colleagues about how we can use these great new technologies to solve interesting problems Faster, Better, Cheaper in order to make our clients happy. When working with one of our Outsourced Product Development clients or speaking with an Business Information Services prospect about how Hadoop can be used to streamline content processing it sometimes seems like that technology is important in and of itself.

But, sorry to say, the technology is not important by itself. And being an expert in a given technology is not enough. The true value that a "developer" or technology consultant brings is the ability to solve business problems, often by using technology in innovative ways. In order to solve those business problems, you have to understand the business domain.

Having an understanding of the business, the associated terminology, how the business model works, how the business makes a profit, how the proposed solution will add to that profit is critical in making all the little tradeoffs that must be made each day while designing and implementing a solution. In our RIGHTLine(TM) software development process we identify the need to have Knowledge Acquisition as part of the software development lifecycle. It's not enough to document requirements in a Business Requirements Document, the people writing and reading the requirements also have to have a shared understanding of the context that the solution and the requirements apply to.

When you try to apply a more agile development methodology, with more decisions made by the developers during implementation, this knowledge of the business becomes even more critical. A quote from one of our clients summarizes this well, he wants to have "ad server developers, not Java developers."