A surprising number of companies discover, when they try to switch vendors, that they do not really own their software. The code lives in someone else's account, nobody knows how to deploy it and the only documentation is in one developer's head.
The checklist
- Source code in a repository your company owns, from the first commit
- Cloud accounts, domains and third-party services registered in your name
- A README that gets a new engineer running the project in under an hour
- Automated deployment, so releasing does not depend on one person's laptop
- An architecture overview and a record of the important decisions
- Credentials stored in a password manager you control
None of this is expensive when it is done from the start. All of it is painful to reconstruct later. A partner who is confident in their work will set things up this way without being asked.