What you should receive
- The repository, with history, in your account
- All credentials in your accounts
- A setup guide another developer can follow
- A runbook covering alerts, deployment and rollback
- A decisions record explaining the non-obvious choices
If any of those are missing, you cannot change supplier, which is not a position any business should accept.
Test the handover
- Someone else runs it locally from the guide
- Someone else deploys a small change
- You access every account independently
- You restore a backup
- You find the code where you expect it
The setup guide is the practical test. If a competent developer cannot get it running in a day, the handover is incomplete regardless of its length.
The runbook is what matters under pressure
| Entry | Contains |
|---|---|
| Each alert | What it means, first three checks |
| Deployment | Steps, and how to roll back |
| Scheduled work | What runs when, and what if it did not |
| Providers | Who to contact, with account references |
| Common problems | Symptom and resolution |
Name the owner
Someone in your business who knows what the application should do, decides what changes, and notices when something is wrong. Not necessarily technical.
Applications without an owner drift: nobody notices the report that stopped or the process that changed six months ago.
Support options
- Retained — monitoring, updates, priority response, a monthly fee
- Ad hoc — you call when needed, quoted
- None — fully yours, we remain reachable
All three are legitimate. What is not legitimate is nobody doing the maintenance, which is the default when it is not decided.