An undocumented function hidden in a program that may or may not be sanctioned by management. Easter Eggs are secret "goodies" found by word of mouth or accident. See Trapdoor.

An Easter Egg is an unexpected surprise -- an undocumented procedure or unauthorized feature that's playful in nature or gives credit to the software developer or chip designer. Like their namesakes, Easter Eggs can be quite elusive and hard to find.

An Easter egg is the hidden functionality within an application program, which becomes activated when an undocumented set of commands and keystrokes are entered. Easter eggs are typically used to display the credits for the development team or a humorous message and are intended to be nonthreatening.

In the virtual world, “Easter eggs” describes hidden code that appears within an application if a certain action triggers the abnormal application behavior. Finding these Easter eggs can be fun. Video games for example are known to be chock-full of Easter eggs AKA cheat codes (remember the Shift+L of the original Prince of Persia?). Even Microsoft developers have done this, adding their own sense of humor to the mix by hiding such eggs in old versions of Excel. Since 2002 however, this practice has been officially banned by Microsoft as part of its Trusted Computing Initiative for the security implications of such eggs. As it turns out, security and Easter eggs go hand in hand.