MOOD: Mindfulness fOr sOftware Developers

Peopleware, which includes anything related to the role of people in Software Development (SD), has been arousing an increasing interest from both the software industry and research community. This interest is due to the current economic system that demands high-quality software products with a short time to market, staying on the budget. This exposes software developers to the risk of experiencing stress, burnout, and reduced motivation, leading, in turn, to reduced job performance, low-quality SD-related artifacts, and increased turnover. Mindfulness represents a promising intervention that might let developers do their best at work, limiting or even preventing the previously mentioned negative outcomes. This paper presents MOOD (Mindfulness fOr sOftware Developers), a research project whose overarching goal is to customize a well-known and validated group-based intervention program, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), in the context of SD-related tasks and assess whether it helps developers to improve their well-being and performance, as well as the quality of the SD-related artifacts they produce.