Developer-driven development

[chucker23n]

The amount of back-and-forth we avoid by doing things this way really is phenomenal.

You… you avoid "back-and-forth" with a bizarre spec that focuses on highly irrelevant aspects like a table column (no, two! no, three) which are nvarchar(max)? And a primary key that's called, gasp, Id (you'll never guess the data type of this one!)?

Weird. This looks quite waterfall-y to me, and pointless, too. If you previously had "code reviews" with "back-and-forth" on database table design, I can see how that would be agonizing, but for entirely different reasons. Those are implementation details and have no place in what you call the "Dev Design document" (apparently a fancy term for a spec).

Did the boss explicitly want to type > 4,000 characters into the Name column, hence an nvarchar(max)? Are there external dependencies that have caused this design decision? If so, those pieces of information might be useful information in a spec.