The Contractor Handoff Scorecard: 12 Acceptance Tests, OpenAPI Stubs, and Figma Slices Every Handoff Must Include

Make the handoff a single 15‑minute ritual: open the scorecard, run the tests, paste the API stubs, export the Figma slices, and mark items pass/fail. Treat each failing item as a single bug ticket assigned to the contractor for closure before final payment or sign‑off.

This ritual forces clarity. When you ask engineers or contractors to implement from a design, ambiguity is the number‑one cause of rework. The scorecard turns ambiguity into binary acceptance criteria: the test either passes or fails, and the asset either exports correctly or it doesn’t.

Acceptance tests need to be short, deterministic, and focused on visible behavior. Below are 12 small checks you can paste into a Playwright test file and run. Each test maps to a common acceptance class: routing, auth, form validation, error handling, visual asset, and localization. Use these as smoke tests for the contractor’s feature branch.

The test snippets assume Playwright test runner structure and a staging URL. They intentionally avoid fragile timing and instead assert on visible elements, network success states, and accessible attributes. If one fails, capture the trace, create a bug with the failing test, and require a green run before final sign‑off.

API confusion is another big vector for rework. Don’t hand contractors a vague API surface—attach minimal OpenAPI example stubs to each ticket showing the request body you expect and an example success response. These stubs serve two purposes: they give frontend developers concrete payloads to mock, and they make backend acceptance quick to verify.

Keep each stub to the fields the frontend needs (no extra noise). Mark which fields are required for the flow, provide one valid example, and one error response example. Use these stubs as the canonical contract in the ticket and in automated API mocks used by end‑to‑end tests.

Prepare Figma for handoff by explicitly marking frames 'ready for dev', adding slices for every exported asset, and applying the export settings that developers expect. Use Figma’s Slice nodes or export settings on components so anyone can export the exact PNG/SVG/PDF with the right scale and color profile.

Standardize the rules: name exported assets with a clear suffix, set SVGs for icons, include 2x/@2x if you support high‑DPI screens, and attach a short line in the design notes describing where the asset is used. This reduces the ‘which logo did you mean’ back‑and‑forth that eats days of contractor time.