Context: The Open Science (OS) movement promotes the value of making public the research artifacts (datasets, analysis scripts, guidelines, etc.) used during empirical studies. OS is widely known in areas such as Medicine or Biology, where the process of sharing research artifacts is subject to strict protocols. Unfortunately, in Software Engineering (SE), this process is carried out in a non-systematic way, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate material shared by researchers, which hinders the reproducibility and replicability of empirical studies. Nevertheless, in recent years, it seems that the Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) community is embracing some of the proposed OS initiatives, such as the one proposed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which provides a badge system to evaluate the quality of a research artifact. This badge system has been adopted by several SE conferences as a method of assessing research artifacts. Aims: Focusing on human-oriented experiments (HOEs) in SE, whose research artifacts are more complex than those for computational experiments, this work applies Design Science Research (DSR) with a twofold purpose: (i) review the current status of HOEs research artifacts publication through evaluation of this practice in the most relevant ESE journals , and (ii) propose a structured outline for HOEs research artifacts driven by the aforementioned ACM badging policy. Method: Regarding the first purpose, we carried out a survey to analyze the current status of the publication of research artifacts considering relevant peer review journals and the quality of 106 research artifacts published in these journals with respect to the ACM badging policy. For the second purpose, an iterative process was carried out to review the content of 106 research artifacts research and their concordance with ACM badges, obtaining a structured scheme for HOEs research artifacts that has been validated through a detailed review of 12 research artifacts obtained from some of those of ACM badges in relevant SE conferences. In addition, we validated the proposal in the research artifacts of 2 of our own experiments. Results: Our survey reveals issues such as the 39,70% of journal studies making completely accessible their research artifacts; most of the analyzed research artifacts are incomplete; the most common repositories used in the ESE community to share the research artifacts are GitHub, institutional repositories, and Zenodo. On the other hand, the validated and structured research artifact outline consists of a list of ordered sections containing a set of artifacts, which can be mandatory or not to achieve a particular ACM badge. For its internal validation, several improvement iterations on the first release of the outline have been carried out based on the conference guidelines, the ACM badging policy, and other relevant proposals. Conclusions: Although the ESE community is making great efforts in standardization, review, and digital publishing related to OS, the availability and completeness of research artifacts can be improved. Our proposal for the elaboration of structured research artifact outline meets the requirements of HOEs in SE. Nevertheless, further research is needed not only to improve and externally validate it but also to disseminate its use among the research community.

Background. Mindfulness is a meditation technique whose main goal is educating attention by focusing only on one thing at a time, usually breathing. Mindfulness practices improve concentration and attention, being particularly valuable in demanding and high-stress work settings, such as those found in software companies. A family of five controlled experiments on the impact of mindfulness on future and current software engineers' performance has been carried out in six years, whose participants practiced mindfulness daily for several weeks. Aims. This work has a twofold purpose, to present the fifth experiment in the series and to summarize the lessons learned across the family of experiments. The fifth experiment was carried out at INPRO, a public software company in Seville (Spain), in order to evaluate whether software workers improve their performance and some psychological factors, i.e. attention awareness, techno-stress and well-being, compared to a control group. Method. Employees of two departments (Development and Operation) were recruited to participate in the study. Mindfulness (the treatment) was applied to 24 subjects who attended mindfulness sessions daily for six weeks, while the other 27 subjects were the control group. For all subjects, such psychological factors were measured using questionnaires, whereas performance was measured using INPRO's task management systems. Results. Findings have shown significant differences in terms of attention awareness and techno-stress levels between the practitioners who practised mindfulness and those who did not. Benefits on the perceived well-being have also been reported by participants after the continued practise of mindfulness. Regarding the performance, the analysis depicts inconclusive results, probably due to the small size of the sample, a problem which was accentuated by significant variability in the kinds of tasks performed in both departments. Conclusions. Mindfulness practice has yielded significant benefits in the series of experiments, such as performance in the academy and psychological factors in the industry. Nevertheless, its impact on performance in software companies requires further research, since the limited data availability on subjects' performance has led to a small sample size, ultimately posing challenges in drawing dependable conclusions.