Background: A previously proposed Design Thinking-based Requirements Elicitation Process distinguishes between internal and external empathy as distinct sub-activities. To corroborate the effectiveness of this distinction, empirical validation is required. Objective: The main goal of this paper is to present a quasi-experiment carried out with the aim of comparing the use of the Vision Canvas technique for internal empathy and the Empathy Map technique for external empathy in requirements elicitation, assessing whether and how these techniques enhance stakeholder and requirements identification during Brainstorming sessions. Method: The quasi-experiment involved 138 undergraduate Computer Engineering students at University of Sevilla. Three treatments were considered: a combination of both techniques (Vision Canvas followed by Empathy Maps), Empathy Maps alone, and a control group relying solely on Brainstorming. Results: The results revealed an improvement in stakeholder identification using empathy-based techniques, with statistically significant differences observed when these techniques were applied in combination. Additionally, the analysis showed an increase in the number of requirements ideas generated with either technique, compared to the control group. Conclusions: While these findings support the distinction between internal and external empathy in requirements elicitation, further research is necessary to determine the optimal application of these techniques across different contexts.

Abstract Context Women have historically been underrepresented in Software Engineering, due in part to the stereotyped assumption that women are less technically competent than men. Pair programming is both widely used in industry and has been shown to increase student interest in Software Engineering, particularly among women; but if those same gender biases are also present in pair programming, its potential for attracting women to the field could be thwarted. Objective We aim to explore the effects of gender bias in pair programming. Specifically, in a remote setting in which students cannot directly observe the gender of their peers, we study whether the perception of the partner, the behavior during programming, or the style of communication of Software Engineering students differ depending on the perceived gender of their remote partner. To our knowledge, this is the first study specifically focusing on the impact of gender stereotypes and bias within pairs in pair programming. Method We have developed an online pair-programming platform () that provides a collaborative editing window and a chat pane, both of which are heavily instrumented. Students in the control group had no information about their partner’s gender, whereas students in the treatment group could see a gendered avatar representing the other participant as a man or as a woman. The gender of the avatar was swapped between programming tasks to analyze 45 variables related to the collaborative coding behavior, chat utterances, and questionnaire responses of 46 pairs in the original study at the University of Seville, and 23 pairs in the external replication at the University of California, Berkeley. Results We did not observe any statistically significant effect of the gender bias treatment, nor any interaction between the perceived partner’s gender and subject’s gender, in any of the 45 response variables measured in the original study. In the external replication, we observed statistically significant effects with moderate to large sizes in four dependent variables within the experimental group, comparing how subjects acted when their partners were represented as a man or a woman. Conclusions The results in the original study do not show any clear effect of the treatment in remote pair programming among current Software Engineering students. In the external replication, it seems that students delete more source code characters when they have a woman partner, and communicate using more informal utterances, reflections and yes/no questions when they have a man partner, although these results must be considered inconclusive because of the small number of subjects in the replication, and because when multiple test corrections are applied, only the result about informal utterances remains significant. In any case, more mixed methods replications are needed in order to confirm or refute the results in the same and other Software Engineering students populations.

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.

Purpose: Mindfulness is a meditation technique whose main goal involves maintaining a calm mind and training attention by focusing only on a single thing (the support) at a time; this support is usually the practitioner's breathing. The practice of mindfulness aims to improve concentration and attention, which has proven useful in knowledge-intensive and stressful work environments like technological companies. This article aims to find empirical evidence on the positive effect of the practice of mindfulness on a sample of 56 helpdesk employees working for a consulting and information technology company (Accenture) with respect to: i) their attention awareness; ii) a set of key performance indicators (KPIs); and iii) the perceived benefits of mindfulness. Method: Of the 56 recruited employees, 29 worked as managers, and 27 worked as agents answering phone calls to solve software issues of the main information system of the Andalusian Health Service, a public organization with more than 115,000 employees. Mindfulness (the treatment) was applied to 26 subjects, while the other 30 subjects were the control group. For all subjects, their attention awareness was measured using the MAAS scale. Results: Both helpdesk managers and agents significantly improved their attention awareness with respect to the control group. Regarding organizational KPIs, in general, no evidence of significant differences between groups was detected, apart from the fact that the number of phone calls answered was significantly lower in the mindfulness group, probably due to a longer call duration caused by a deliberate better attention to the customer, but without degrading any other KPI. With respect to the perceived benefits of the treatment, the questionnaires show relevant improvements perceived by most employees after practicing mindfulness.Conclusions: We confirm that mindfulness improves attention awareness and benefits the working and personal life of helpdesk employees. However, further research is needed to identify a clear impact on productivity.

Context. Mindfulness is a meditation technique whose main goal is keeping the mind calm and educating attention by focusing only on one thing at a time, usually breathing. The reported benefits of its continued practice can be of interest for Software Engineering students and practitioners, especially in tasks like conceptual modeling, in which concentration and clearness of mind are crucial.Goal. In order to evaluate whether Software Engineering students enhance their conceptual modeling performance after several weeks of mindfulness practice, a series of three controlled experiments were carried out at the University of Seville during three consecutive academic years (2013–2016) involving 130 students.Method. In all the experiments, the subjects were divided into two groups. While the experimental group practiced mindfulness, the control group was trained in public speaking as a placebo treatment. All the subjects developed two conceptual models based on a transcript of an interview, one before and another one after the treatment. The results were compared in terms of conceptual modeling quality (measured as effectiveness, i.e., the percentage of model elements correctly identified) and productivity (measured as efficiency, i.e., the number of model elements correctly identified per unit of time).Results. The statistically significant results of the series of experiments revealed that the subjects who practiced mindfulness developed slightly better conceptual models (their quality was 8.16 percent higher) and they did it faster (they were 46.67 percent more productive) than the control group, even if they did not have a previous interest in meditation.Conclusions. The practice of mindfulness improves the performance of Software Engineering students in conceptual modeling, especially their productivity. Nevertheless, more experimentation is needed in order to confirm the outcomes in other Software Engineering tasks and populations.

Context. Many reports support the fact that some psycho--social aspects of software engineers are key factors for the quality of the software development process and its resulting products. Based on the experience of some of the authors after more than a year of practising mindfulness---a meditation technique aimed to increase clearness of mind and awareness---we guessed that it could be interesting to empirically evaluate whether mindfulness affects positively not only the behaviour but also the professional performance of software engineers.