With Great Humor Comes Great Developer Engagement

The worldwide collaborative effort for the creation of software is technically and socially demanding. The more engaged developers are, the more value they impart to the software they create. Engaged developers, such as Margaret Hamilton programming Apollo 11, can succeed in tackling the most difficult engineering tasks. In this paper, we dive deep into an original vector of engagement – humor – and study how it fuels developer engagement. First, we collect qualitative and quantitative data about the humorous elements present within three significant, real-world software projects: faker, which helps developers introduce humor within their tests; lolcommits, which captures a photograph after each contribution made by a developer; and volkswagen, an exercise in satire, which accidentally led to the invention of an impactful software tool. Second, through a developer survey, we receive unique insights from 125 developers, who share their real-life experiences with humor in software.Our analysis of the three case studies highlights the prevalence of humor in software, and unveils the worldwide community of developers who are enthusiastic about both software and humor. We also learn about the caveats of humor in software through the valuable insights shared by our survey respondents. We report clear evidence that, when practiced responsibly, humor increases developer engagement and supports them in addressing hard engineering and cognitive tasks. The most actionable highlight of our work is that software tests and documentation are the best locations in code to practice humor.CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Programming teams; • Social and professional topics → Cultural characteristics.LAY ABSTRACTModern software applications are built piecemeal. They are composed of a large pool of contributions made by individual software developers. These developers spend long hours brainstorming with colleagues, solving challenging engineering problems, and writing code. Software companies put different strategies in place to engage their developers and support them in coping with these hard tasks. In particular, some organizations and groups of developers decide to nurture the creative and expressive aspects of software development. In this work, we study a universal human trait that has been key for creativity since the dawn of civilization: humor. Humorous software code is a powerful deterrent to boredom. It can uplift the mood of the developer who writes it, as well as a peer, separated by time and space, who chances upon this nugget in the codebase. For example, Leia Organa is as perfect as John Doe for a placeholder customer name while testing an e-commerce application. A gallery of photographs can serve as a cheerful journal of the Wednesdays spent hacking away with a colleague. Software may also act as a humorous, satirical piece on socio-political issues. In this paper, we discover the different ways in which software can be a source of developer amusement and engagement, and help foster a sense of community among them.