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

TL;DR

This paper presents 17 practical empathy guidelines for software engineering practitioners, aiming to enhance teamwork, communication, and decision-making, supported by real-world application insights and a prioritisation framework.

Contribution

It introduces a set of actionable empathy guidelines tailored for software engineering, along with a visual prioritisation framework to facilitate their adoption in practice.

Findings

17 empathy guidelines proposed for SE practitioners

A visual prioritisation framework categorises guidelines by importance and ease of implementation

Practical strategies for integrating empathy into daily SE work

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.