White-Label Drupal Development

The end of an engagement is the part agencies should ask about first.

Documentation is a deliverable rather than a favour, and it is written for a developer who has never met us, which is the only useful test of whether it is any good. The repository is yours and lives in your account; there is no build step that only runs on our machines, and no deployment that only we can reach.

At offboarding, access is revoked on your side rather than surrendered on ours: you remove us from the tracker, the repository and any environment you granted, and you do not need our cooperation to do it. What we hold afterwards (working copies, credentials, client material covered by the NDA) is covered explicitly by the agreement rather than assumed, and we follow whatever retention and deletion terms you set.

The test of all of this is whether another Drupal team could pick the work up. Standards-compliant code, tests, documentation and a repository you control are what make that true.

What damages an agency in a subcontracting arrangement is rarely malice. It is an email sent to the wrong person during an incident.

So the communication rules are settled before the work starts, not during the first outage. There is one route in and one route out: your project contact talks to our engineer, and nobody improvises. We do not have your client in an address book. If something goes wrong in production we tell you, with what we know and what we do not, and you decide what your client is told and when, because you are the one who has to say it.

Escalation is agreed in the same conversation: who to reach out of hours, what counts as critical, and what the first response target is. Our published warranty targets are a first response within four hours for critical issues, one business day for high priority and three business days for normal. Those are first-response targets rather than resolution commitments; anything tighter belongs in your agreement and is set per engagement.

We never invoice your client, never appear in their vendor list, and never hold a credential of theirs that you did not issue to us.

The questions we would ask a subcontractor, with our answers to each.

• Can we see the repository during the build? Yes, from the first commit, in your own account. Otherwise you are buying a status report.
• Who exactly is working on it? Named engineers. If one leaves mid-engagement you are told first, with a handover rather than a substitution.
• Is non-solicitation in the contract? Yes, covering your clients and your staff, and ours.
• What do you hold after the engagement ends? Only what your agreement allows, for as long as it allows.
• Is there public code we can read? Our contributed modules are on drupal.org, with their issue queues.
• What is the warranty, and what does it exclude? One year by default, up to three, held by your agency, covering defects rather than new features: set out in full here.