Two weeks ago I had to give feedback to my team members for their yearly review and I quickly realized I had two choices:
- Either spend one hour for each colleague and only fill out the general feedback form that was given to me by the company which is used for all type of job functions (easy route)
- Or spend a couple of days and create a tailored framework for detailed evaluation of a software developer in an agile team (hard route)
and as always I chose the hard route with a better long-term outlook over the easy route and the short-term fix!
I have high expectations, high standards, and a comprehensive yardstick for anyone with a senior developer title.
And since all my team members are senior devs, I had to come up with set of principles that make a software team exceptional.
A software team that is the manifestation of 80/20 rule for the software development department of our company.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).
The result?
Here is a visual of how I think about an excellent developer:
In short the most important things for me are the following:
- Consistently delivering quality, timely and collective results while knowledge-sharing, collaborating and communicating effectively with colleagues.
- Demonstrating a growth seeking mindset both personally and work-related with an ownership attitude.
- Acting like a senior dev by taking initiatives to improve reliability, maintainability and scalability of the product/system.
After I was done with the evaluation framework, the next question that popped in my head was: how can I share this framework with other Team Leads in the company so they can also benefit form it without much effort?
The answer?
Let’s create yet another internal app! (:
Then with the help of ChatGPT I created an aditional app (called it “Dev Excellency”) and added it to our existing internal toolkit which is called “agilekit” which I have developed myself since I joined censhare to help all development teams in the company with some agile (and even HR) related processes.
agilekit - an internal toolkit for agile software teams - created by myself at censhare
This app gives Team Leads (or as it’s Engineering Mangers in some other companies) an organized way to think about evaluting software developers based on the framework I shared earlier.
How does it work?
You create a new “Assessment” and choose a team member that you want to give feedback to. And then the system will fetch some interesting metrics from Jira about the epics, user stories, story points, average velocity and some other data in some tables, charts and graphs to help you get an overal picture of achivements of that person during the whole year.
Then there is a drop down for a list of principles that you can chose from and rate developer’s performance for that specific principle.
And once you are done with the whole list the detailed assessment will be created and the each dev can see it in their dashboard like this:
I already did the evaluation for all my devs and received a lot of great feedback from them:
Almost all of them mentioned they never received a detailed feedback like this in their career and they are happy to see every small thing that they did during the past year to help the team and the company was noticed, captured and taken into account for their performance evaluation, and that now they have meaningful and actionable items for improvement.
I think the way we give feedback in the software industry is broken.
This was my first attempt to fix it on my part.
What do you think of this framework? how was the last feedback you received in your job? was it fair? was it detailed?
Love to hear your thoughts!