Pre-Handoff Engineering Checklist

No system should be handed to Anchor until the development company confirms the following readiness gates.

Service Readiness

• Production endpoints are identified and documented.
• A working /health endpoint exists.
• A /metrics endpoint exists where metrics are appropriate for the system.
• Logs are structured and usable for production diagnostics.
• Authentication, dependency, and failure behavior for health checks are documented.

State and Recovery

• Stateful components are identified.
• Backup requirements are documented for every stateful component.
• Backup ownership after handoff is defined.
• Restore steps or restore references exist.
• Recovery assumptions and recovery time expectations are documented.

Operations Readiness

• A production runbook exists and is accessible.
• Known failure modes are documented.
• Restart and recovery procedures are documented.
• Dashboards, monitors, and alert expectations are documented.
• Incident contacts and escalation paths are documented.

Ownership and Access

• The development company owner is identified.
• Anchor operational owner is identified.
• Domain, DNS, and Cloudflare ownership or delegated admin model is documented.
• Production admin placement is documented for hosting, observability, security, and secrets systems.
• Break-glass access expectations are documented where applicable.

Change Governance

• Production change procedure after handoff is agreed.
• Rollback expectations are documented.
• Release approval expectations are documented.
• Emergency change handling is documented.

Risk Disclosure

• Open risks are listed.
• Known technical debt affecting operations is disclosed.
• Unsupported or manual recovery steps are disclosed.
• Dependencies controlled by third parties are identified.

Completion Rule

The checklist is complete only when the development company and Anchor both agree that production operations can be performed without hidden dependencies or ambiguous ownership.