Jeremy Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Specialist, misses easter eggs in Microsoft's current products. In his arguments Jeremy doesn't agree with one of customers who claimed that anyone who adds easter eggs couldn't be trusted to create software to run enterprise-scale businesses. He states that he always "enjoyed the creativity and humor behind these little gems".

I tend to agree more with what Michael Howard and David LeBlanc write in their book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd edition" (chapter 2, page 47): never include easter eggs in software. These are my concerns:

• Does the customer receive a real added value with the easter egg?
• What if the easter egg would contain an vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers? (Didn't happen yet, as far as I know.)
• Wouldn't it be better that the development team spent their valuable time on different things, like features or code reviews?

While Jeremy says that easter eggs were never near critical path code in the teams he worked on, I don't think this is a valid excuse to include one.

What do you think about easter eggs?