What should be required from the development company?

Question

Documentation

Hello. Dear programmers, please enlighten. We are going to develop a highly loaded web application for one developer company. Questions arose, some of them paranoid, but I ask you to really help with practical advice:
1. What should the company provide us, besides a working application, so that in the future full-time developers can easily pick up the project?
2. What should be the quality of the code, are there any quality standards that need to be reflected in the contract?
3. What is the attitude of companies to the NDA agreement?
4. What project documentation should we receive from the developer?
5. Do I need to write a clause about backdoors in the contract, does it work at the judicial level?

Answer 1

All purely imho:
Changing the development team is always a pain.
If this is an abrupt change of team, then either it ends with rewriting 70-80% of the code, or lay ~ 30% of the resources spent on development on getting the new team up to date.
In my opinion, there are 2 ways to avoid this:
a) buying the original team on staff
b) participation of your full-time developers in the project from the very beginning (but few outsourcers will do this)
well, you should provide the source code without obfuscation, with readable variable names, formatting according to accepted language standards (for php, for example, this is PSR), documentation.
You can reflect anything, and even if you wish, you can try to control it - this will remove the risks that the source code is not reusable, but will not remove the cost of studying it. For good - ask the outsourcer for some internal documents regulating their code quality, show it to your development team, if everything suits you - include it in the contract.
Treats perfectly, but NDA in the Russian Federation does not work in fact. Although all of them are very fond of signing with or without reason.
The one your developers want. For a web application, in my opinion, the minimum program is
a) TK according to which everything is written
b) a description of the external and internal components of the application, what they do and how they interact
c) a description of the database structure, both objects with links and fields. If somewhere denormalization - justification for its presence and a description of the logic.
d) description of the endpoint of the project, if any (api, etc.)

5. Do I need to write a clause about backdoors in the contract, does it work at the judicial level?

In the Russian Federation imho is not present.

Answer 2

3. they are in the rhythm of the dance, they have nowhere to go,
just indicate the term, for example, there is no indefinite term for 5 years,
but with the rest, if you ask, everything is very bad,
the fundamental question is whether all codes a) give b) open, this is sooo strong depends on the roughness of the track

Answer 3

1) documentation for the code. personally, I take + 10% for this
2) what you reflect in the terms of reference, such will be.
3) if they want to steal, then, believe me, no NDA will stop anyone, because how will you prove it?
4) the one that you specify in the terms of reference
5) if the contractor gives you a code signed with an electronic signature and you can prove in court that the backdoor was deliberately introduced - then without a contract