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With Great Humor Comes Great Developer Engagement

Deepika Tiwari, Tim Toady, Martin Monperrus, Benoit Baudry

TL;DR

This work investigates humor as a driver of developer engagement by analyzing three real-world projects—faker, lolcommits, and volkswagen—that embed humorous elements in testing, commits, and CI, respectively, supplemented by a developer survey of 125 respondents. Through case studies and qualitative interviews, it shows how humor can stimulate creativity, collaboration, and morale while maintaining engineering rigor. The survey identifies where humor most effectively resides in code (comments, documentation, and test data) and highlights benefits such as increased engagement and stronger team bonds, balanced by cautions about readability and scope. Practically, the paper provides guidelines for responsible humor and demonstrates that humor can yield tangible benefits, including tooling like is-ci, contributing to a more engaged and resilient software development community.

Abstract

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.

With Great Humor Comes Great Developer Engagement

TL;DR

This work investigates humor as a driver of developer engagement by analyzing three real-world projects—faker, lolcommits, and volkswagen—that embed humorous elements in testing, commits, and CI, respectively, supplemented by a developer survey of 125 respondents. Through case studies and qualitative interviews, it shows how humor can stimulate creativity, collaboration, and morale while maintaining engineering rigor. The survey identifies where humor most effectively resides in code (comments, documentation, and test data) and highlights benefits such as increased engagement and stronger team bonds, balanced by cautions about readability and scope. Practically, the paper provides guidelines for responsible humor and demonstrates that humor can yield tangible benefits, including tooling like is-ci, contributing to a more engaged and resilient software development community.

Abstract

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.
Paper Structure (14 sections, 3 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 14 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Case Studies of Software Developer Engagement with Humor
  3. Testing: Faking It While Making It
  4. Commits: LOLs All the Way Down
  5. CI: But It Works on My CI
  6. Takeaways from the Case Studies
  7. Developer Survey
  8. Methodology
  9. Where Does Humor Belong in Code?
  10. Humor, What is it is Good For?
  11. Responsible Humor?
  12. Summary
  13. Related Work on Humor in Software
  14. Conclusion

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Comic strips are classics in software engineering barros2017use. Credits: https://xkcd.com/.
  • Figure 2: A crowd enjoying lolcommits in April, 2023
  • Figure 3: According to the survey respondents, the practice of humor in software is appropriate within documentation, immediately followed by test inputs.