A Lot of Talk and a Badge: An Empirical Analysis of Personal Achievements in GitHub

GitHub has introduced gamification via personal achievements, whereby badges are unlocked and displayed on developers' personal profile pages in recognition of their development activities. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods empirical investigation to study the diffusion of personal badges in GitHub in addition to the effects of and the reactions to their introduction. First, we conducted an observational study by mining longitudinal data for over 6,000 developers and performed correlation as well as regression analysis. Then, we analyzed 33 answers to a survey and 312 GITHUB community discussions about personal badges to gauge how the community reacted to the introduction of the new feature. We found that most of the sampled developers own at least a badge, but we also observed an increasing number of users who choose to keep their profile private and opt out from displaying badges. Besides, badges are in general poorly correlated with developers' qualities and dispositions such as timeliness and desire to collaborate. We also found that, with the exception of the Starstruck badge and the number of followers, their introduction to GitHub had no effects. Finally, the reaction of the community has been in general mixed, as developers find them appealing in principle but without a clear purpose and hardly reflecting their abilities in the current form.