On the Impact and Lessons Learned from Mindfulness Practice in a Real-World Software Company

Abstract

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.