I was recently contracted to develop a smarty theme for an automated SOHO phone answering service. The team who had built the backend wouldn't allow me access to any of the back end nor tell me anything about it, their smarty set up, smarty plugins, data base interface api, server set-up, nothing. Nor could I have access to the server nor a beta domain, basically zero co-operation.

So I set up a local server with Smarty and built the template based on what I guessed would be their best practice, commented my code like crazy, wrote all the needed javascript, css, and template files. Then I sent them packaged to the backend team and hoped for the best.

With half of a project team failing to cooperate or even communicate I am now concerned that they may reply saying that everything is wrong and they may refuse to implement the new front end.

I'm curious to know if others encounter this type of situation and what you may have done to protect yourselves.