Empathy Guidelines for Improving Practitioner Well-being & Software Engineering Practices

TL;DR

This paper addresses the under-explored role of empathy in software engineering and its impact on practitioner well-being and product outcomes. It derives 17 actionable empathy guidelines from interviews with 22 software practitioners and validates them through a large-scale survey (n=103 valid responses) complemented by a visual prioritisation framework that maps guidelines on importance, ease of implementation, and willingness to adopt. The integrated analysis identifies four strategic zones—Quick Wins, Nice to have, Strategic Investments, and Lowest Priority—to guide phased adoption, supported by practical strategies to overcome common barriers. The work provides a concrete, practitioner-driven roadmap for embedding empathy into SE practice, with implications for team culture, process design, and organizational policy that can improve collaboration, retention, and software quality.

Abstract

Empathy is a powerful yet often overlooked element in software engineering (SE), supporting better teamwork, smoother communication, and effective decision-making.This paper introduces 17 actionable empathy guidelines designed to support practitioners, teams, and organisations. We also explore how these guidelines can be implemented in practice by examining real-world applications, challenges, and strategies to overcome them shared by software practitioners. To support adoption, we present a visual prioritisation framework that categorises the guidelines based on perceived importance, ease of implementation, and willingness to adopt. The findings offer practical and flexible suggestions for integrating empathy into everyday SE work, helping teams move from principles to sustainable action.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Overview of Demographic Information of Large-Scale Survey Participants
• Figure 2: A three-dimensional view of empathy guidelines' readiness: importance (x-axis), ease of implementation (y-axis), and adoption willingness (bubble size) based on practitioner ratings. Higher values on the x- and y-axes indicate higher perceived importance and greater ease of implementation, respectively. Larger bubbles indicate stronger willingness to adopt each guideline. This visualisation follows the scoring scheme used in the survey, where higher numerical values correspond to more favourable practitioner ratings, indicating greater ease rather than difficulty. All underlying numerical values used to construct the framework are available in our online Appendix("Detailed Guidelines Analysis – Quant" sheet)Gunatilake2025zenodo.
• Figure 3: Practical approaches for implementing "Quick Wins" empathy guidelines in green colour (high importance, high ease) and "Lowest priority" empathy guidelines in purple colour (low importance, low ease) at the practitioner, managerial, and organisational levels.
• Figure 4: Practical approaches for implementing "Nice to have" empathy guidelines (low importance, high ease) at the practitioner, managerial, and organisational levels.
• Figure 5: Practical approaches for implementing "Strategic Investments" empathy guidelines (high importance, low ease) at the practitioner, managerial, and organisational levels.