AncaA's tech journal

Whenever you are writing your CV, all the good practices say that you should make sure to state your achievements and your results.

But, when working as a developer, what can be considered an achievement ?

Unlike a salesman, that can say how many products he sold, how can the developer evaluate his work ? Or how is his work evaluated ?

I have asked this question and here are the answers that I received from people with a quite diverse background :

From an academic researcher :

A developer is a simple black-box-machine:
- input: software specifications
- output: piece of software that fills the requirements of the specification.

You have to evaluate the quality of the output (the software: the code + the documentation + tools + etc.).
Quality is represented by many parameters:

- amount of requirements that are or not implemented
- amount of bugs and security leaks
- maintainability ,portability ,brute performance ,elegance ,time needed

Then, as it is heavily non-linear, you have to find scales for each parameter, giving higher coefficients for what is the most important for you.

From a project manager :

The work of a software developer could be evaluated using the metrics “man*days”.
A software developer (programmer) receives from a functional analyst a “specification” to (software) develop and a dead-line (each specification is previously estimated, as if the development is realised by a medium level programmer) and estimations are included in MS Project planning by PM).
By comparing programmer’s results with estimation you have a clear report between a programmer qualified “medium level” and the studied human resource.

From a senior consultant :

If the product of a software developer is software, then you are measuring the quality of the software (using whatever criteria you normally use), and the quality of the code. It also depends on how much freedom the developer has.
For example, implementing a routine specification using an rigidly established set of methods (paint-by-numbers programming) would have a different set of standards from open ended problem solving.

From an HR person :

- Education background
- Number of years of experience
- Number of quality projects executed
- Customer feedback
- Certifications on domain or technology
- Respect and conduct in team

The greatest achievement is to stay one or two steps ahead of the curve with the new releases of your sw language and/or tools

From an entrepreneur :

As a company owner, we consider lot of factors, some are measurable and some are not.

Following are some of them:

- He/she should understand client’s perspective and do the work by considering project as their own. This is vital as currently the developers are working for the sake of money and complete the things quickly whatever assigned by managers. They do not think out of box about the projects and related issues.
- They should be good team player. I believe that at last team wins not a single performer. So he should work easily in any team.
- Quality in whatever he develops. We measure this by review of code as well as the bugs produced by the module done by them.
- The last but most important is he must be quick learner. In Software industry, there are lot of things regularly updating and changing. And in such environment, if developer just do one work with great value doesn’t count. There should be some motivation into developer to learn new things quickly and also apply those into the project.