What to Get from a Developer Before the Contract Ends

A handover is complete when someone else can clone the repository on a clean machine, build it, and deploy it to a test environment using only what was handed over. Schedule that test while the developer is still available. Every place it stalls is something to ask for.

Six things to ask for

1. The repository, with history, under an account you own. A zip of the latest code loses the commit history, which is the closest thing to a record of why decisions were made. Confirm the organization, not an individual, owns the repository.

2. Every account the system depends on, and who owns each one. Domain registrar, DNS, hosting or cloud subscription, certificates, email delivery, payment gateway, app store accounts, third-party API keys, license keys. Any that sit under the developer's personal email need to be transferred before they leave.

3. The deployment steps as they are really performed. Include the manual ones: a config value set by hand, services restarted in a certain order, a certificate renewed from a calendar reminder.

4. Everything that runs on a schedule. Scheduled tasks, SQL Agent jobs, background services: what each does, which account it runs as, what order matters, and how to tell that one failed.

5. What consumes this system. Reports run directly against the database, exports other departments rely on, partners that call an endpoint or pick up a file.

6. What looks wrong and is intentional. The workaround for a vendor quirk, the duplicate nightly job that applies late corrections, the column that must stay. This list takes the developer an hour to write and saves weeks.

The working session

Book two hours on a screen share and record it. Have the developer deploy a small change from start to finish while someone on your side watches and asks questions. Then walk through the last three production incidents: what happened, how they found it, what fixed it. Written documentation describes the system. The session shows how it is operated, and that part is rarely written down.

If the developer has already left

Run the clean-machine test anyway, since it shows exactly what is missing. Then work the six items from the evidence you have: the production server, the database, account recovery through your billing records, and the people who use the system. What to do when your .NET developer leaves without documentation covers that path, and what changes when the original developer leaves explains what is hardest to rebuild.