Goal Setting for Software Developers: 49 Real Examples

May 12

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Everyone needs to have work goals to push themselves further and have an actionable career roadmap charted out.

SMART goals are imperative for success when planning out annual or quarterly performance goals, especially in the case of software developers. If the term ‘SMART goals’ doesn’t ring a bell, this refers to goals that are:

Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Relevant
Time-bound

SMART performance goals aren’t the exactly easy to come up with. That’s why we’ve taken the time to source the following goals from real software developers. We’ve hand-picked our favorites to inspire you and your team.

Good luck with goal setting!

Coding Goals

Lead a team to develop and deliver innovative new features such as Guest Checkout, achieving 35% increased signups for the loyalty program and 5% lift in conversion in the first weeks after launch.
Develop a feed management gateway service using Java, Spring, MongoDB and RabbitMQ for uploading over 3 million unique products across 20 categories and 6 clients to Google Merchant Center.
Streamline user invoicing process by 15 - 20% through constructing 2 major pages (from UI to backend) that merge the rates and bills procedures with Java, Spring, and DB2.
Spearhead the implementation of the redesigned My Account page from Walmart's new site launch, when it became the first Brazilian company with 100% uptime during the period between black friday and cyber monday, surpassing the revenue target by 50%
Implement Spring Security for user authentication. Remove custom login routines which failed internal security audits. Reduce common vulnerability attacks and standardize username and password storage across the application.
Design and implement a customer service application for Mobile Banking Services on the Android platform. Banking transactions were simplified and the new application contributed to the 30% increase of quarterly revenue.
Integrate and implement SOA Sabre services into banking system to allow bank users to redeem reward points online. The reward program reduced Call Centers calls by 30%.
Implement a solution to meet web accessibility standards and guidelines (WACG) along the site content. Redesign layout permitted that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web. According to automated accessibility testing tools the evaluation report reached 40% accessibility compliance.
Design and build an algorithm to increase the correctness of the resume parsing process by 70%.
Build an indoor positioning system using WiFi, accelerometer and magnetometer signals to locate a shopper in a particular department or aisle. Used a combination of neural networks and support vector machines to achieve 95% accuracy in our classification. Lead data collection, pre-processing and classification algorithms.
Develop custom device to cloud protocols, RESTful APIs, backend platform and Alexa App GUI for wirelessly synchronizing music across Alexa family devices.
Deliver a near real time analytics platform processing 250K+ events/sec. It enabled up to minute freshness analytics that allowed internal products to be smart and data driven resulting into 400% CTR lift.
Design and a build system to prevent revenue loss of $5M on an annual basis.
Create a platform to make display ads contextually relevant. Open up demand for niche advertisers and result in15% increase in revenue.
Improve ad delivery metrics by 20% via ad pre-fetch.
Reduce publisher page ad latency reduction by 40%.
Increased bug detection by 10%.
Upgraded deprecated libraries on build servers.

Code Ownership Goals

Implement Spring-Data-REST and Lombok to reduce overall codebase by ~30% for internal inventory system for an online beauty and skincare purveyor.
Optimize software development time by > 15% through creating 10+ RESTful API methods to supplement existing Java and Spring backend modules as part of service-oriented architecture redesign.
Maintain 100% uptime of Google AdWords and Bing Ads internal publishing services with Java, ensuring changes to Required Minimum Functionalities (RMFs) are met and third-party API issues are avoided.
Save the company thousands of dollars by proposing and implementing the use of open-source Java Native Access to extract critical data from a third-party mileage application, which was otherwise unavailable.
Proactively collaborate with users, QA engineers, and other stakeholders during development lifecycle, while adhering to strict guidelines for documentation and processes, reducing turnaround time by ~20%.
Represent the company writing technical articles and giving lectures at conferences and meetups.
Advocate for coding standards and better performance, by measuring and fixing issues found with tools such as YSlow.
Write Technical Documentation for the Telstra custom application stack. Inherited documentation was disorganized, sometimes not accurate and artifacts were scattered throughout the enterprise. Interfaced with development and performed local testing to ensure documentation was current, accurate, and met the actual software template design of Telstra. Currently 90% of the application stack is documented according to common Telstra design standards.
Enable payments for a critical new Yahoo product that leveraged this new platform and as a testament to the robustness of this platform, is confidently on track to generate >5 MM micro transactions per annum.
Radically improve the platform’s global failover capabilities and readiness including improving overall uptime to 99.99 from 95%, thereby reducing annual revenue loss by 10s of MMs of dollars.
Pioneer use of SOA framework and Proxy server (now ATS) in Media.
Increased code quality by 15% per code analysis done by a third-party code analysis tool.

System Design Goals

Architect and orchestrate the implementation of a modernized Product Details Page: fully responsive, universally rendered (isomorphic), with a loosely-coupled component-based architecture, consuming microservices and lazy-loading components not needed during the page load, using Marionette.js, Handlebars, ES6 and Node.js
Architect backend web service that allows owners to manage inventory, orders, pricing and cash flow that combine multiple currencies.
Responsible for planning, analysis, design, development, tests, deployment and management of Dupox ERP project, a client/server ERP software tailored to the company needs.
Deliver a radically new design and implementation approach that reduced complexity by over 90% and time to market by 95% leveraging the right combination of core internally managed services while leveraging 3rd party integration for remaining services. Approach also met and exceeded PCI DSS 3.0 compliance requirements.

Debugging Goals

Detect and fix a major memory leak present on almost every Selenium test case, reducing the overall memory footprint in about 30%.

Testing Goals

Follow test driven development (TDD), achieving ~85% code coverage writing 300+ unit tests with JUnit.
Code 100% of the project’s unit tests in JUnit and integration tests in Ruby Watir.
Standarize and enhance Unit testing across the custom application stack. At the beginning the test coverage was measured at 12% and only reached a high of 50% in some application modules. After adding and combining existing JUnit tests to the critical admin and engine components, test coverage reached 80%.
Self-learn Elasticsearch within two weeks to interpret and summarize the 10GB testing log file to improve testing process.
Drive the adoption of full CI/CD development practices thereby making production deployments robust, efficient and reduced time to production by over 90% with zero downtime requirements.

Teamwork Goals

Be recognized in < 1 year with “Play to Win as a Team” Living Our Values award (top 4% of the company) shortly after promotion to Senior Software Engineer.
Using agile methodologies, we introduce remote work in a productive manner, visiting the client's office in São Paulo every other week (once per iteration) in order to do retrospective, review and next sprint planning.
Partner with different stakeholders across Alexa to achieve business goals by prioritizing roadmap items.

Leadership Goals

Lead team of 7 engineers through scrum agile development, with 2 week sprints and Git for version control.
Mentor over 20 engineers and product managers of varying levels (IC3 to IC6) across the organization on careers, products and best practices.
Seed the Ad Format Foundation team in Seattle, grew the team from 1 to 10 people, improved Facebook Inc ads revenue by over 7%. Per January 2020, Facebook Inc ads revenue was $69.66B.
Directly manage a group of engineers, providing them with tailored guidance, training and expectations to succeed on their projects and clients.
Direct a team of 12 talented engineers on a scrum agile basis, clearly prioritizing, guiding, coaching and growing their skills and work assignments, achieving >85% manager satisfaction rating.
Served as a member of the diversity committee in Q1 thru Q4.

People Goals

Conduct over 350 interviews to vet senior engineers, engineering managers and senior engineering managers.
Perform over 400 technical interviews in Data Structure/Algorithms and Web Development Technology.
Lead and refine our technical recruitment and training activities, mostly on front-end. In particular, spearheaded the creation of a new code challenge for React candidates.
Build a team from ground up and grow it to 12 talented engineers.