Decoupling technical and business decisions is very important. Every time I sit in a meeting where technical people are making business decisions and business people are making technical decisions, I get frustrated. This is one aspect of XP that I truly believe in.

No discussion has really taken place regarding the “business requirements” for the project I’m working on. If it has, it was well buried in technical discussion about the database schema. These technical discussions are carried out with the customer. The developers sit down and try to sell the customer on different concepts of database normalization and auto-generation of IDs.

The necessary element is trust, I guess. This customer is so used to approving technical decisions that it might be hard for him to be placed in an environment where he just gives a high-level set user stories (perhaps elaborating on some special cases) and then trusting that the development team will deliver something that will perform the tasks that he wants.

A set of screen mock-up might have been a nice thing to have. That would have given him an idea of the flow of the application from a higher level than the database schema.