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.Goal. In this paper, we present a quasi-experiment carried out at the University of Seville to evaluate whether Software Engineering & Information Systems students enhance their conceptual modelling skills after the continued daily practice of mindfulness during four weeks.Method. Students were divided into two groups: one group practised mindfulness, and the other-the control group-were trained in public speaking. In order to study the possible cause-and-effect relationship, effectiveness (the rate of model elements correctly identified) and efficiency (the number of model elements correctly identified per unit of time) of the students developing conceptual modelling exercises were measured before and after taking the mind-fulness and public speaking sessions.Results. The experiment results have revealed that the students who practised mindfulness have become more efficient in develop-ing conceptual models than those who attended the public speaking sessions. With respect to effectiveness, some enhancement have been observed, although not as significant as in the case of efficiency.Conclusions. This rising trend in effectiveness suggests that the number of sessions could have been insufficient and that a longer period of sessions could have also enhanced effectiveness significantly.

Process performance indicators (PPIs) allow the quantitative evaluation of business processes, providing essential information for decision making. It is common practice today that business processes and PPIs are usually modelled separately using graphical notations for the former and natural language for the latter. This approach makes PPI definitions simple to read and write, but it hinders maintenance consistency between business processes and PPIs. It also requires their manual translation into lower-level implementation languages for their operationalisation, which is a time-consuming, error-prone task because of the ambiguities inherent to natural language definitions. In this article, VISUAL PPINOT, a graphical notation for defining PPIs together with business process models, is presented. Its underlying formal metamodel allows the automated processing of PPIs. Furthermore, it improves current state-of-the-art proposals in terms of expressiveness and in terms of providing an explicit visualisation of the link between PPIs and business processes, which avoids inconsistencies and promotes their co-evolution. The reference implementation, developed as a complete tool suite, has allowed its validation in a multiple-case study, in which five dimensions of VISUAL PPINOT were studied: expressiveness, precision, automation, understandability, and traceability.

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In any discipline, replications of empirical studies are necessary to consolidate the acquired knowledge. In Software Engineering, replications have been reported since the 1990s, although their number is still small. The difficulty in publishing, the lack of guidelines, and the unavailability of replication packages are pointed out by the community as some of the main causes. Objective: Understanding the current state of replications in Software Engineering studies by evaluating current trends and evolution during the last 6 years. Method: A Systematic Mapping Study including articles published in the 2013-2018 period that report at least one replication of an empirical study in Software Engineering. Results: 137 studies were selected and analysed, identifying: i) forums; ii) authors, co-authorships and institutions; iii) most cited studies; iv) research topics addressed; v) empirical methods used; vi) temporal distribution of publications; and vii) distribution of studies according to research topics and empirical methods. Conclusions: According to our results, the most relevant forums are the Empirical Software Engineering and Information and Software Technology journals, and the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement conference. We observed that, as in previous reviews by other researchers, most of the studies were carried out by European institutions, especially Italian, Spanish, and German researchers and institutions. The studies attracting more citations were published mainly in journals and in the International Conference on Software Engineering. Testing, requirements, and software construction were the most frequent topics of replication studies, whereas the usual empirical method was the controlled experiment. On the other hand, we identified research gaps in areas such as software engineering process, software configuration management, and software engineering economics. When analysed together with previous reviews, there is a clear increasing trend in the number of published replications in the 2013-2018 period. INDEX TERMS Empirical software engineering, replications, systematic mapping study.

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% higher) and they did it faster (they were 46.67% 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.