How to Complete Great Developer Performance Reviews

Performance reviews allow you to slow down and assess your developers' growth over the past quarter, six months, or year. Without them, you miss the chance to align the developer's growth with the company's growth. But they can be incredibly time-consuming to complete and hard to get right, especially when juggling scattered notes and months of data.

A structured process can make all the difference, helping you clearly understand performance, progress, and opportunities for growth. Here are best practices for conducting a great performance review.

Overview

Completing a good performance review requires gathering several resources:

• Developer brag documents, where your developers can advocate for themselves by sharing their view on their primary achievements.
• One-on-one or personal notes. These provide you with the most honest assessment of the developer over the period without the recency bias. Ideally, you've flagged key items for performance reviews throughout the year for easy reference.
• Developer contributions, such as the projects they've worked on or key tasks completed.
• Key tasks completed outside of the SDLC system. These could be things like mentoring team members or leading a knowledge-sharing session.
• Skill progression, such as learning a new language or becoming a go-to person for a critical internal system.

Once you've gathered all the necessary resources, you're ready to begin drafting a meaningful performance review that will help your developers move forward. Here's how to proceed step by step.

Step 1: Collect the Developer's Brag Document

It's important to get your developer's input on their performance & progress. While most performance review processes designed by HR will have a self-review component, this misses the mark for software developers as they do not ask about specific development efforts. Development efforts are shrouded in development fog, making them easy to forget or misattribute.

Download Brag Document Template

Using the template above, create a unique document for each developer. Send it to them and ask them to fill it out.

Step 2: Gather Notes, Developer Contributions, Key Tasks Completed, and Skills Progression

Next, gather the following:

• One-on-One Notes: Pull up your note taking system and find your notes for the developer. You will look for patterns or recurring themes in feedback, achievements, and challenges.
• Developer Contributions: Pull data from your SDLC tool (like Jira) to identify the developer's contributions to key projects or tasks. If you have a system that shows metrics such as tickets resolved, code reviews completed, or delivery timelines, pull this up as well.
• Key Tasks Outside the SDLC System: Identify contributions that may not be tracked in your development tools, such as mentoring other team members, organizing knowledge-sharing sessions, or improving internal processes. Create a list of these contributions.
• Skill Progression: Assess the developer's growth in specific technical or interpersonal skills. Examples include mastering a new programming language, becoming proficient with a new framework, or taking on leadership responsibilities in a team setting.

Once you have all of this information in front of you, you are ready to begin your performance review.

Step 3: Draft Highlights & Previous Period Activity

Your goal is to get an accurate reading on how the developer performed & progressed through the period. Download the template below or create your own document.

Download Review Template

a) Highlights

Write down obvious highlights in the "Highlights" section. While most highlights are positive, you may have negative highlights. Leave the "Previous Period Activity" section blank for now.

Read through the developer's brag document. Decide if you need to add or remove any highlights.

b) Previous Period Activity

Then, read through your notes & developer activity again and fill in the "Previous Period Activity." Note that there is a section at the bottom for brag doc items, but you may want to include an item in the previous period activity section as well.

Step 4: Draft the Remaining Sections

a) Sentiment Trends

Summarize the developer's sentiment over the period in a few sentences. Has the developer become more aligned with the company? Are they growing increasingly frustrated? Have they stayed the same? Use this section to provide feedback that either reinforces their current alignment or helps address any misalignment with their role.

b) Brag Items

Fill in relevant brag doc items. Add your commentary or review notes.

c) Action Items

Highlight relevant career growth action items that you did not cover in the previous period activity section. These items could be actions related to skills or leadership development, such as completing a tutorial course or taking on more responsibilities in meetings.

d) Skills & Systems Development

Highlight advancements in their skills or systems knowledge. If the developer was tracking towards a goal, mention that here. Did they reach their goal? Why or why not?

Step 5: Review the Document & Use It!

With all sections filled in, read the document. Do the highlights need to be changed? Does the document give an accurate account of what happened?

Once completed, you will have a great performance review document for the developer. You can use this in a few ways:

• As you complete your official performance review, you can use this as your main data source.
• If you need to advocate for a raise or promotion, this document provides a clear & concrete picture of how the developer performed & progressed over the period.
• You can use specific points mentioned in the document if you need to provide constructive criticism.
• You may want to share the document with your developer.
• Make sure you save the report for comparison during the next performance review.