Goals for software engineer

If you look at your goals from the previous year, write a little on how you have achieved them. If you havent achieved them, write on how much you have achieved and how you plan on achieving them in the upcoming year. As mentioned at the top of this post, focus on the positive. You can also refer to comments made by your manager or human resources member, or whoever gave you feedback last time. If they have suggested areas for improvement which they usually will , then you can write a little on these and how you may have improved or achieved them.

By doing this, youre basically saying that youve met the requests that your company has asked for over the last year, which is a great way to get a good review. Another part of what to write in a performance review to get a great result is to set some goals for the upcoming year.

Companies like employees who have direction and focus on their future, and who like to improve themselves. Think about what you want to achieve in the future, both in the short term and the long term. I have written a post on why you should set career goals which could be helpful. Some goals you could set are:. I found the inspiration for this post as I was filling out my own performance review. My review with my current employer happens every June, and the process starts in April.

I need to come up with some goals for my review for the upcoming year, and I thought, what do I put down? After filling out my own review form and sending it to HR, I thought, how could my readers benefit from this experience? So I decided to write this article to help you come up with some goals for your review.

The first thing many of you myself included may be thinking about is, why do you even need to put goals on your performance review? Shouldnt performance reviews be just that, a review of your performance? That would make sense! However, the performance review is just a common term for this process. The aim of this review process is to discuss how you have been performing for the previous period, and then to make plans for your job and career for the next period once again, usually a year.

The plans part is where the goals come in. Setting goals for a performance review is good so you know what to focus on for the next year, whether its improvements in your current role or advancing to something else.

The goals in a performance review are usually revisited on your next review as well. So, for example, during review 1, any goals you set there would be checked again during review 2 to see if you have met them. Setting good goals will help you get a good result on your performance review. One of the most common goals Ive put down in the past is around improving skills that Im not strong in.

One of the skills required to do that is to lead projects. High quality products that customers love start with each line of code. Ensuring we maintain strong code quality at the lowest will set the tone for the rest of the business and help mitigate issues. Developing a world class product is not a solo initiative. A successful engineer knows the importance of collaborating with peers, product teams and other areas of the business.

Your technical skills are the foundation of a strong engineering team and we want to see you grow those skills to be a strong team member. Nevertheless, there are distinct and important goals of software engineering. Software engineering best practices ensure that software developed by a delivery team, a contractor, or an individual developer is high quality and efficient.

If applications do not meet these best practices, it puts you at risk for outages, security hazards, and failing systems--adherence to software engineering best practices help to prevent that. Iterative Development An important development methodology best practice in software engineering is iterative development.

Iterative development ensures that software flaws or risks are resolved before there has been a lot of time and effort put into the software. This development approach enables continuous testing and continuous integration which creates the opportunity for early feedback so that changes can be made swiftly. Service-Based Architecture and Microservices Service-Based Architecture and Microservices are some of the most critical best practices in software engineering today.

Service-based architecture is a software design best practice where services are provided to other components by application components, through communication protocols. A service is a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely and acted upon and updated independently.

It has four properties:. Software Modelling Using visual modeling tools helps to improve the ability to manage software, rationalize, and maintain that software. It will also help to keep information among the team easy to understand and constant — which is especially important in agile development when multiple teams are working laterally to develop the same software or updating the same application portfolio.

Or on the contrary, what made you want to hit the snooze button each morning? Nothing is worse than feeling lost in your profession. Software engineering has a ton to offer, but it can also be very stressful. As a parting thought, I would challenge you to undertake two modest assignments this coming week:. Kicking off these simple tasks today will add confidence, clarity, and purpose to your life.

Sharon Sahar has over 20 years of experience in software engineering as a developer, manager, and co-founder. By Sharon Sahar September 13, About the author. Sharon Sahar Sharon Sahar has over 20 years of experience in software engineering as a developer, manager, and co-founder.