
Ask HN: Taking over after contractors jump ship - bartmcpherson
I was brought in to a company to build their own internal development team. They have a few projects in active development with a couple of contracting firms. The plan was to slowly wean the projects away from the outside firms to internal development.<p>One of the firms has decided to immediately abandon the project they’ve been working on. We have the source and the app runs on our own servers, but that is about it. No documentation or architectural artifacts of any sort.<p>The business has been happy with the product so far. The contractor is “focusing their business on their larger clients”.<p>What has worked best for HN reader’s when taking over a project with little to no documentation&#x2F;design documents?
======
greenyoda
See if you can talk to the people in your company who hired the contractor.
They might at least be able to give you a high-level description of what the
software is supposed to do and how it's supposed to work. They might even have
specs that they prepared for the contractor or other design documentation.

If the contractor's software has no tests or is poorly written, it's going to
be hard to add features to it or refactor it. You might want to read _Working
Effectively with Legacy Code_ [1] by Michael Feathers, which describes how you
can get a handle on large bodies of legacy software.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-
Fea...](http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-
Feathers/dp/0131177052)

------
chrisbennet
I would try to talk to the contractors. As a contractor myself, the only
reason I would drop a client is if they stopped paying me. There might be a
reason they jumped ship....

------
ExpiredLink
Unprofessional company, unprofessional contractor.

~~~
greenyoda
Yes, unilaterally deciding to walk away from a development effort in the
middle sounds like it could be a breach of contract (assuming that there was a
reasonably written contract).

