In my CTO as a Service consultancy, I tend to use various remote development companies to write the code for my clients. Even though I still code after all of these years, I am usually not cost-effective for my founders in a coding role. (But I still do the architecture, all of the set up on the cloud platform, and occasionally write some critical code.)
When the engagement with the development team ends, there is a wrap-up process that takes a few days to accomplish. If you have a remote development team, then you should allow them at least 3 or 4 days to perform these final items.
I would love to hear about your own list that you go through in order to wrap up an engagement.
(Note: Even though I mention AWS in this article, you can substitute any cloud provider, such as Azure or GCP.)
Tasks for Wrapping Up
Documentation
- Read, edit, and check the documentation that the consultants write so that it can be handed off to another development team
- We need the following documentation
- Architecture diagrams, including integrations with 3d-party services
- Structure and flow of the backend and frontend code, including interaction with 3rd party services
- Deployment instructions for all environments
- Troubleshooting guide
Code
- Code review (if time allows)
- Go over the Jira to see what was not done and to see if anything was left in a partial state
- Make sure that all tests are passing
- Making sure that all code has been merged to Main
- Make sure that we have access to all secret keys and PEM files
- Make sure that we have access to all licensing and credentials for 3rd party libraries and systems
- Doing a deployment on both test and production to make sure that we know how to do it ourselves
AWS
- Checking out the production database to make sure that everything is smooth
- Make sure that all routes are correct in Route53
- Tighten permissions on S3 buckets
- Closing down all open permissions on the various machines
- Possibly removing the consulting team from Github, AWS, 1Password, Twilio, Stripe, etc
Monitoring
- Install Monit on all machines
- Setting up various CloudWatch alarms on AWS
CTO as a Service has over 30 years of writing systems, leading development teams, and doing architecture reviews. I work with all sizes of companies, but I love helping startups realize their visions. Services include hiring and leading development teams, architecture, code and architecture reviews, roadmaps, coding, speaking with investors, etc.