Code Tagging as a Social Game

Keywords or tags summarize documents on an abstract level and can also be used for describing code fragments. They might be leveraged for retrieving features of a software system, understanding program functionality, or providing additional context. While automatic approaches at best are only able to retrieve information that is already contained in the source code, manual tagging could add valuable extra information from qualified expertise of the developers. However, tagging code is tedious. To make code tagging more fun, we introduce a social gasification approach: developers independently tag code fragments and are rewarded if their solutions conform to the solution of other developers. We implemented the game as a Facebook plug-in. A pilot user study suggests that the game mechanics are motivating and promote the proposition of reasonable tags.