How can I pad out my appraisal objectives?

Question

I am a software developer and we are having an appraisal for the past calendar year. One of the sections in the appraisal form indicates that I have to list five objectives and score them accordingly.

My problem is, if I have only worked on 2 projects the past calendar year, how am I supposed to fill up the others? Would someone from the software development industry and also others give some advise please.

Answer 1

If an objective does not need to be tied to a concrete project, objectives could be:

1. Learning new skills
2. Helping team mates
3. Recieving help from team mates
4. Automating processes
5. Improving estimates
6. Dealing with non-programmers

Answer 2

Do you only do one thing on each project? If you do two things, then that's two objectives.

So if on project A, you're doing the preliminary design, and then you will specify the tests, then your objectives are:

• Deliver the completed design.
• Deliver the test specifications.

And as morsor notes, objectives don't have to relate to a specific project. Other things you do can become objectives.

Answer 3

For each project, you can make up many objectives:

• Doing the design
• Communicating with the business side
• The actual implementation can have milestones
• Documentation
• Spreading the knowledge among other developers
• Training of users
• Rolling out the work
• Setting up the monitoring
• Writing tests
• Steady progress reporting during standups
• Coaching other developers working on the project
• Meeting deadlines
• Being proactive
• Dealing with change of requirements/feature requests
• Liaison with sysadmins/dbas/network admins/security/...
• How you deal with setback

Etc.