What is it about?
This study explores how empathy is understood, practiced, and challenged in software teams. We analyzed 55 articles from the DEV and Medium communities and followed up with a survey of empathy experts. Our findings led to a conceptual framework that defines empathy in SE, identifies barriers (like toxic work culture and excessive technical focus), and outlines practices to foster better communication, collaboration, and well-being.
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Why is it important?
Empathy helps us communicate, collaborate, and work better as teams. But in software engineering, it's often overlooked or misunderstood. We wanted to change that by listening to developers who’ve reflected publicly on their experiences.
Perspectives
This isn’t just about “being nice.” Empathy is a socio-technical skill that can improve software quality and well-being. By making empathy visible, naming its blockers, and offering strategies, our work helps teams reflect, adapt, and grow. There’s no universal definition of empathy in software engineering. By gathering how real devs talk about it, we help build a clearer and more practical understanding that reflects the human side of coding, collaborating, and caring.
Lidiany Cerqueira
Federal University of Bahia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring Empathy in Software Engineering: Insights from a Grey Literature Analysis of Practitioners’ Perspectives, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, July 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3748721.
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