Post Contract Support Retainer
What is a post contract support retainer?
We’ve worked on software projects long enough to know things don’t always go exactly to plan.
Delays can occur with testing due to conflicting priorities, so you may not find issues with the modules built at the end of a contract until after the developers have moved on. New requirements may come out during the test phase when the end customers get their hands on the new features for the first time. Important Scenarios that only occur occasionally can easily be missed during requirements gathering.
Specifications can be misinterpreted, and devilish detail requirements can rear up inconveniently in the later stages of a project when your developers have moved on to other projects and your contractors have moved onto other clients.
Of course, as professional contractors, we provide documentation and hand-overs to your developers to enable them to support the new modules we develop. Even so, there will be times when it would be so much quicker if they could ask the original developer a question rather than having to dig through documentation and notes of a half-remembered handover.
The original developer would usually be able to make a small change to their code much quicker than anyone else, especially if it is fairly soon after the original development because they are familiar with the detail of it.
This is why we now offer a post-contract support retainer, to give you a more stress-free transition after the end of the contract.
10 hours for the price of 1 day
For the cost of just one extra day of your contract, you can buy a post-contract support retainer for 1 month, consisting of 10 ad hoc developer hours, for issues relating to code developed during the last 3 months of the contract.
What's Covered?
Up to 10 hours of developer time per month, for the small follow up tasks related to modules developed during the last 3 months of the contract. These hours can be called off upon request for qualifying tasks during the retainer period.
These ad-hoc hours can be used as follows:
- small changes to software worked on in the last 3 months of the contract
- responding to email queries about the code worked on in the last 3 months of the contract
- short meetings over teams or zoom, subject to availability and by agreement, related to the code worked on in the last 3 months of the contract.
- fixing minor issues found during testing that were not explicit in the requirements specification at the time of development, or which have changed since then.
- questions from the developers or testers now looking after the code. Often a quick question to the original developer can save hours of digging through documentation and code.
Conditions
- All work will be done remotely.
- Remote access to the source code and test rig to repllicate any bugs must be provided.
- Clear replication instructions and data must be provided along with issue reports to enable the developer to replicate bugs and issues efficiently.
- Where possible, the original developer will be assigned to work on any issues raised, however if they are not available another suitably skilled developer will be assigned.
- The 10 hours expire at the end of the calendar month. They cannot be carried forward, even if a subsequent retainer is purchased.
- You are only eligible to purchase a post contract retainer if you previously had a contract with Chaos On Toast that ended within the last 3 months. After that the benefits of being able to call on the original developer will diminish as they start to forget the details.
Service Level
- Initial response to requests by email for call off time or bug fixes will be provided within 2 business days.
- Where agreed, work on changes or bug fixes will be scheduled to start within 5 business days, and will aim to deliver as quickly as possible after this time.
Cost
Your contract with us will have been based on a nominal day rate.
The post-contract support retainer is available to you, per month, for the cost of one day of your latest contract with us.
For the price of 1 contract day, you get 1 month’s peace of mind and support while you wrap up your testing.
Additional Time Blocks
You don’t really need these if you don’t have a full contract with us.
However, if you do need to make more significant changes to modules developed during the contract, and you would like us to pick some of these up on an ad-hoc basis, please get in touch. We may be able to provide additional blocks of ad-hoc developer time of at least 4 hours, at our ad-hoc rate, depending on availability.