6 Things You Must Know Before Changing Developers

Businesses need to change app developers at times for various reasons. Whether your company has out-scaled your developer or you want better services, changing developers can be very difficult.

Access and Permissions

To ensure a smooth transition for your new developers, it’s important to grant them access to critical project aspects. This includes providing access to the CI/CD pipeline, encompassing repositories, build configurations, and deployment scripts, with deployment process documentation. It is also crucial to bestow comprehensive authorizations for cloud services such as Heroku or AWS. These permissions encompass databases, virtual machines, and storage resources, ensuring an uninterrupted workflow.

Project Artifacts

With the knowledge transfer, you need to understand the importance of providing them with unrestricted access to crucial project artifacts. This entails granting them access to the most up-to-date version of source code, along with a comprehensive understanding of coding standards, conventions, and any external libraries or frameworks that have been employed.

Access to development scripts and configuration, and understanding of deployment environments such as staging and production, are of paramount importance. It would be greatly appreciated if you could provide any available test cases and test data, enabling new developers to fully comprehend the testing strategy and coverage.

It is essential to have transparency between your old and new developers. You need to set up knowledge transfer sessions where all details on the ongoing projects are shared. This includes all of the documentation that is relevant to the app, the code that has been finalized or under review, and the following credentials:

• Google Play Store dev accounts & certificates
• Apple App Store dev accounts & certificates
• AWS or other cloud hosting accounts, .pem file, etc
• Database management service accounts & credentials
• Documentation with Deployment steps on different environment
• Other third-party service account credentials

It is also important for the older developers to forego any ownership of the code unless it falls under their intellectual property. Having everything well documented during the change in developers is important to avoid any potential legal trouble.

Documentation

The documentation also encompasses architectural documentation, including architectural diagrams and detailed component descriptions to illustrate system interactions. For projects with APIs, it’s essential to provide API documentation, encompassing endpoints, request/response formats, and authentication mechanisms, with tools like Postman or Swagger collections being advantageous.

Furthermore, access to database schema documentation, including tables, relationships, and data dictionaries, is crucial, and an Entity-Relationship (ER) diagram can greatly facilitate understanding.

Any code written by your development team needs to be transferred to your new team. The documentation for the code and the development roadmap need to be shared to make the transition smoother as well.

The source code, Github repositories, logos and other assets need to be transferred to your new developers. Your new developers need to be familiar with cloud migration or legacy migration to make the transition easier.

If things do not end well with your old developers, you may need to work with your new development team. The new dev team will need to fill in all the gaps in documentation and assets that are required to continue your existing projects.

Transfer Of Ownership

You need to check the IP/Source Code of your project to ensure the ownership of all the code belongs to you. Assuming you have a professional relationship with your old developers, the transition process should be smooth.

All certificates that were used to create your apps on Apple App Store, Google Play Store, or any other web app store need to be transferred to the new developer. All private .pem and p.12 keys for server instances should be transferred to your new developers as well.

Your old developer has to relinquish all ownership of the code. The company will also have to declare on record that they will not retain any code or other details about your old projects.

Code Quality Reports

As a business owner, your goal should be to improve your app when you change developers. If you are satisfied with your old developer, then your apps should maintain the same quality going forward. By using code quality reports, you can track performance and compare your developers.

There are tools available that check your code and ensures it is working as intended, is consistent, and is documented well. There will be hiccups when changing developers, and manual code reviews don’t cut it for such situations.

Software code quality reports are much more efficient and are not susceptible to human error. According to a study, coders are approximately 50% efficient at finding bugs. This is why most testing is done via independent software testers.

And with your development team changing, the odds of finding bugs go up even higher because of complexities. Maintaining quality is not just the responsibility of your new development team but also your organization. It would be best if you are transparent with your new developers to ensure you are on the same page to get the best results.