The situation people call us about
Usually the call comes from someone who has already spent a serious share of the budget and holds a product that half works. The developer vanished, left the company, or the relationship broke down, and there is no documentation.
It is an unpleasant position, and far more common than each person in it believes. We do not need explanations about what went wrong; we only care about what can be done from here.
- The project has been at seventy per cent for months and the number does not move
- You have no access to the source code or to the server it runs on
- Every small change breaks something else
- You cannot tell whether continuing or starting over is cheaper
We start with an audit, not with promises
The first step is a short assessment, paid for separately, at the end of which you receive a written document rather than an opinion over the phone.
- What the application actually does today, against what it was meant to do
- The state of the code: what can be recovered, what has to be rewritten, what is dangerous
- The state of the database and whether the existing data can be kept
- The security risks found, ordered by severity
- What is missing before it can go live
- An estimate for continuing, set against an estimate for rebuilding
We also say when it is not worth continuing
Sometimes the audit concludes that rebuilding costs less than repairing. That is bad news and we deliver it anyway, with the reasoning in the document, not in order to sell a bigger project.
Either way you keep something useful: a document describing exactly what you have, which you can take to anyone, including another team.