What You Should Receive

What you should receive

1. The full repository, with history, in an account you own
2. All credentials in your accounts, not the supplier's
3. A runbook — how to deploy, what breaks, what to check
4. Documented decisions, especially the non-obvious ones
5. A working local setup guide another developer can follow

The local setup guide is the practical test. If a competent developer cannot get the application running from the documentation in a day, the handover is incomplete.

The runbook matters most

• How to deploy, step by step
• How to roll back
• What the scheduled jobs are and when they run
• What each alert means and the first three things to check
• Where the logs are and what normal looks like

Document the decisions, not the code

Code documents what it does. What it does not document is why a particular approach was chosen, what alternatives were rejected, and which apparent oddities are deliberate.

A short record of those saves the next developer from re-litigating settled decisions or removing something load-bearing.

Knowledge transfer

A session with whoever will maintain it, walking through the structure, the important parts and the known rough edges. An hour or two, and it is worth considerably more than the documentation alone.

If nobody in your business will maintain it, that is fine — but the arrangement for who will should be settled before handover rather than after.

Test the handover