Business vs technical logic

Andrew Ferrier draws up an interesting distinction between business and, what he calls, technical logic.

• Technical logic: Stuff we don’t want to do, but need to in order for everything to work.
• Business logic: Stuff we do want to do – the reason we’re doing all this. We can not only decide on how to implement this (as we can with technical logic), we can also decide not to implement it all, or to implement different logic.

As someone who spends his days recommending clients not to put business logic in the integration layer, a simple definition like this one is quite handy. And while this definition might not be complete, it’s good enough for initial discussions.