What happens to your software if your developer disappears?
By John Marta, Principal & Senior IT Architect at GO Build Labs
Sooner or later someone on a first call asks it, usually with an apologetic laugh: what happens if you get hit by a bus? It's the right question. Developers retire, change jobs, get bought out and close their doors, and small firms are no exception, ours included. If your business runs on software that one person or one company understands, their departure is your outage.
Whether that turns into a bad week or a bad year is decided long before anyone leaves. Four things decide it.
You own the code, and you can get to it
Ownership has to be written into the contract, and we covered that side in who owns the software when you pay someone to build it. But owning the code doesn't help if it only lives on the developer's laptop. It should sit somewhere your company can reach, with someone on your side able to sign in, from the first month of the project.
The accounts don't depend on one person
Hosting, the domain name, the database, email sending, payments: every service the system relies on needs an owner your business can reach. When a developer opens these under a personal login for convenience, getting them back after a falling out, or after a death, can take weeks even when nobody means any harm. Ask for a list of every account the system uses and who controls each one.
It's built from ordinary parts
A new developer can pick up a system built with widely used, well-documented tools in days. A system built on one firm's private framework, or in a language nobody hires for anymore, can take months to learn, and some developers will turn it down outright. Ask what the system is built with and how many developers near you could work on it. If the honest answer is "only us," that's the risk.
Someone wrote down how it works
Not a 200-page manual nobody updates. A short document that says how to run the system, where everything lives, how a change gets made and put live, and what each connection to another system does. With the code, that's what lets the next person start work on Monday instead of spending a month working out what the last person did.
A five-minute test
Ask whoever looks after your software for four things: access to the code, the list of accounts and who controls them, the name of the tools it's built with, and that setup document. If any of them is hard to get while everyone is on good terms, it will be harder after someone has gone.
For our clients this is settled before we start. The custom code, the documentation and the hosting setup are theirs from day one, so if they ever move on there's nothing to hand over, and we do a free transition call with whoever takes it on. It's written into our pricing terms, because it should be in writing before anyone signs.