Empathy plays a crucial role in software engineering (SE), influencing collaboration, communication, and decision-making. While prior research has highlighted the importance of empathy in SE, there is limited understanding of how empathy manifests in SE practice, what motivates SE practitioners to demonstrate empathy, and the factors that influence empathy in SE work. Our study explores these aspects through 22 interviews and a large scale survey with 116 software practitioners. Our findings provide insights into the expression of empathy in SE, the drivers behind empathetic practices, SE activities where empathy is perceived as useful or less relevant, and the other factors that influence empathy. In addition, we offer practical implications for SE practitioners and researchers, offering a deeper understanding of how to effectively integrate empathy into SE processes.

Research on human aspects within the field of software engineering (SE) has been steadily gaining prominence in recent years. These human aspects have a significant impact on SE due to the inherently interactive and collaborative nature of the discipline. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) on human aspects affecting developer-user interactions. The objective of this SLR is to plot the current landscape of primary studies by examining the human aspects that influence developer-user interactions, their implications, interrelationships, and how existing studies address these implications. We conducted this SLR following the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham et al. We performed a comprehensive search in six digital databases, and an exhaustive backward and forward snowballing process. We selected 46 primary studies for data extraction. We identified various human aspects affecting developer-user interactions in SE, assessed their interrelationships, identified their positive impacts and mitigation strategies for negative effects. We present specific recommendations derived from the identified research gaps. Our findings suggest the importance of leveraging positive effects and addressing negative effects in developer-user interactions through the implementation of effective mitigation strategies. These insights may benefit software practitioners for effective user interactions, and the recommendations proposed by this SLR may aid the research community in further human aspects related studies.

Software engineering (SE) requires developers to collaborate with stakeholders, and understanding their emotions and perspectives is often vital. Empathy is a concept characterising a person’s ability to understand and share the feelings of another. However, empathy continues to be an under-researched human aspect in SE. We studied how empathy is practised between developers and end users using a mixed methods case study. We used an empathy test, observations, and interviews to collect data and socio-technical grounded theory and descriptive statistics to analyse data. We identified the nature of awareness required to trigger empathy and enablers of empathy. We discovered barriers to empathy and a set of potential strategies to overcome these barriers. We report insights on emerging relationships and present a set of recommendations and potential future works on empathy and SE for software practitioners and SE researchers.