The handover is the product

Six months after a build, the measure of quality is not the Lighthouse score. It is whether the client's own engineer can add a feature on a Tuesday without calling us.

Written documentation decays. What survives is legible structure: consistent naming, obvious file locations, tests that describe intent, and a README that gets someone running locally in under ten minutes.

We now run a handover exercise before the final invoice. A client engineer implements a small real feature while we watch and answer nothing unless asked. Whatever they get stuck on is what we fix.

It has never once gone smoothly on the first attempt, which is exactly why we do it while we are still under contract.