Customer Communication
Martin Fowler recently made an interesting post on his Bliki titled Customer Addinitiy in which he discusses the importance of a developer being able to communicate effeciently with their customer, and I couldn’t agree more.
To me, on a scale of 1 to 10, customer communication ranks a strong 10, while actual technical skill ranks maybes somewhere around 5. There have been times I have seen horribly written software, with code so rank I wouldn’t want to look at it, yet at the same time the software was successful because the developers understood the requirements accurately through constant communication (not that I advocate poorly written code, of course!).
It’s interesting that Martin points out that one of the names Kent suggested for agile was conversational software development, emphasizing that communincation between client and developer is an involved, two way process. Through the process of constant feedback and communication with the customer, developers can be sure to sufficiently translate the requirements as well as be able to make rapid changes, as opposed to having to wait for email replies or the client reviewing the next release.
The other important point he emphasizes is similar to what Eric Evans states in Domain Driven Development … the developer must come to apperciate and understand the domain that their application is working with. Not that they need to be a domain expert, but it helps to understand aspects of the domain (I recall in the past when a client referred to something by one name, yet I understood it as something technical that really had little to do with the domain).
I have to say my favorite project was when I wrote a mortgage application system, which I communicated constantly with people on mortgage lender related mailing lists as well as people on the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization mailing list. I learned so much I feel quite confident when the time comes to take out a mortgage on a new house. 
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