I belive the following is accurate for developing 95% of business applications:

1. People buy software to solve problems, that can be making their life easier, making money or providing pleasure (don’t read too much in to that J)
2. Features enable solutions to problems.
3. When we write software, we build features.
4. With the right level of abstraction there is a common and finite set of features to be implemented in code.
5. Applications should be built by tailoring features to solve a user problem. 
6. If tailoring features has to be done by writing code, so be it, but this is very costly in terms of time and money.
7. It’s preferable to have this done via configuration.

-ec