ACM Inroads: Archive

As I write this, while on research and study leave in Professor Daniela Damian's SEGAL lab in Victoria, Canada, we are engaged in exploring the concept of "empathy," a topic of increasing interest to software practitioners and researchers. So, what is empathy, how might we study it, how could it be developed, and why might it be important for students in the computing disciplines? This column attempts to answer some of those questions.

Empathy then, a phenomenon which has been studied across many disciplines, (with psychology, nursing and medicine being prominent), has been recognized as "a complex phenomenon with no one unified definition." [10] In the software context where studies on empathy have been limited [11], it "has been recognised as a human aspect that can help to understand software developer and stakeholder human interactions." [11] One definition of empathy is "the ability to experience the affective and cognitive states of another person, while maintaining a distinct self, in order to understand the other." [12]

While approaches to assessing and measuring empathy vary, two key methods have been identified: measuring empathy via self-assessments, and via neurophysiological examination methods of studying different brain activities using brain images [10]. Observations of empathy behaviors evident through verbal and non-verbal behaviours have also been conducted by researchers [10]. In a recent multi-method study of a self-assessment instrument "the questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy (QCAE)" [10], was deemed to best fit their goal of understanding how empathy is practiced between software developers and end users [10].

Then, extending beyond the study of empathy at the individual level, for instance, investigating "interpersonal empathy in work groups or teams …, few studies have suggested empathy at the team level as a collective phenomenon, that is, collective empathy, in software development teams." [1] Akgün and colleagues have argued "that collective empathy exists when all team members (e.g., programmers, system developers, testers) perceive or imagine their teammates' affects, partially feel what others are feeling, and then demonstrate pro-social behaviors within their team during the project." [1] This definition of collective empathy, within software development project teams, has been broken out into the three dimensions portrayed in Table 1.

Empathy is a growing area of interest for software engineering [11]. In a recent study of practitioners' perceptions, a thematic analysis of the grey literature from the DEV community has aimed to build on the concept of empathy in software engineering [3,15], and provides useful insights into aspects of empathy for software practitioners. The responses to the five questions asked in the study give realistic insights into how empathy is experienced and perceived. These are presented in Table 2.

In these pragmatic perceptions of practitioners, we see strong echoes of the theoretical dimensions of collective empathy from Table 1. There are also links with some of our own work, drawing on analyses of job descriptions to determine the competencies demanded of software practitioners and exploring how 'dispositions' as one component of a competency may be understood and assessed [2,6,7,13,14]. In that work, discussing whether dispositions could be taught, I noted that "… a disposition "concerns not what abilities people have, but how people are disposed to use those abilities." [18]

So here we are talking about a mindset and attitudinal dimensions, which raises the question can a disposition be taught or is it some innate part of a person's character?" [7] Dispositions such as 'being proactive' are not cut and dried abilities, but "imply a tendency or an inclination to act in certain ways as determined to be appropriate in the situation." [9]

So, relating that work to the idea of 'empathy,' we can see that 'acting with empathy' is not simply an ability, but possesses the essential qualities of a 'disposition,' namely being dependent on how people are disposed to act empathetically and on them having the discretion to decide when and how to act with empathy.

Our own work studying job advertisements to determine the global software engineering capabilities desired by employers, has confirmed that acting with empathy was seen as highly valued.

"The attributes such as Mentorship, Customer Engagement, Collaboration, Leadership, Interpersonal Skills, Knowledge Sharing, Relationship Building, Team Player, Respectful, as…advertised by many companies having global clientele does allude towards a possible distributed or global DevOps role." [14]

While the focus there was on DevOps and global teams, the dispositions (termed 'attributes' in that study) listed above, have a strong fit with the concept of collective empathy.

Relating that concept to the curriculum work of CC2020 [5], and its competency-based approach, where a vocabulary of dispositions was defined [5], the two closest matches to the concept of collective empathy were Collaborative and Responsive defined here.

Collaborative/Team Player/Influencing. Willingness to work with others; engages appropriate involvement of other persons and organizations helpful to the task; strives to be respectful and productive in achieving a common goal,
Responsive/Respectful. Reacts quickly and positively. Respects the timing needs for communication and actions need to achieve the goals of the work.

Further developing on that work, the study by He [13] into the distinctions between expectations of junior and senior software developers, showed that dispositions such as being a team player or having a propensity to share knowledge with others which mapped to collective empathy were identified as being valued.

"The most frequent dispositions are (collaborative), (responsible) and (purpose-driven). Junior job ads focus more on being collaborative, whereas senior job ads also put emphasis on being responsible and purpose-driven on top of being collaborative. Overall, more disposition labels are assigned to competency in senior level job ads than junior level job ads." [13]
"A noteworthy piece of data is that mentorship appears frequently in senior level job ads and is exclusive to senior developers. This suggests that mentorship is a desired and distinctive quality of senior software developers compared to junior developers and is a skill that aspiring senior developers should aim to hone." [13]
"When it comes to disposition, being collaborative often comes with being responsive, since these two form the basis of communication skills." [13]

In a further cross-country study of job advertisements for product manager, product owner, and business analyst roles [2], categorizing the employer expectations into broad themes after a systematic mapping study [16], again we saw a strong fit between findings and the value of empathy in all three roles. Theme headings for the identified themes were depicted below, with the intrapersonal and interpersonal distinction drawn from [17], where the intrapersonal theme tended to strongly map to dispositions, with the term 'empathetic' now occurring explicitly in the job advertisements, as opposed to its earlier implicit presence in advertisements.

Excerpts from the study indicating examples of Job Advertisement content seeking differing forms of collective empathy, for specific roles are given below, [2] (where the numbers in brackets indicate number of occurrences of a theme).

Product Manager Skills Required in New Zealand According to 15 Ads on Seek.co.nz - [Intrapersonal] Empathetic (3) 15 Job Ads [Managerial] PM Practices and Disciplines (5); [Interpersonal] Facilitation (5)
Product Manager Skills Required in India According to 15 Ads on Naukri.com - [Intrapersonal] Empathetic (1) 15 Job Ad [Managerial] Lead a Team of Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Business Analysts (2)
Product Owner Skills Required in Australia According to 15 Ads on Seek.com.au - [Intrapersonal] Self Motivated - [Managerial] Inclusive Leadership/ Encourages diversity/ Environment of collaboration and creativity/Team empowerment (7); [Interpersonal] Skill Development/Knowledge Sharing/Mentorship and Coaching (4)

So, we can see an increasing interest and awareness of the concept and role of collective empathy in software teams, as evidenced through job advertisements and the literature. Cerqueira and colleagues [3] have identified contributions for researchers, practitioners, and educators from their work, where they conclude "Our work emphasizes the value of empathy in software engineering. Nonetheless, it remains an under-researched subject" [3]. They further conclude "For educators: SE educators might consider our results to approach the development of empathy throughout SE education. Moreover, our findings could be helpful for pedagogical interventions to build students' empathetic capacities." [3] The related work we have discussed here on dispositions and their assessment [6,7,9,17], and competency-based curriculum development [4,5], we believe, has potential to more explicitly incorporate collective empathy into the computing curriculum, and suggests one direction for furthering research and educational practice.

References

1. Akgün, A.E., Keskin, H., Cebecioglu, A.Y. and Dogan, D. Antecedents and consequences of collective empathy in software development project teams. Information & Management, 52 (2). (2015), 247–259.

2. Balutia, P. Agile project management - product manager, product owner and BA roles, Master of Information Technology Project Management Dissertation, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, 2023.

3. Cerqueira, L., Freire, S., Bastos, J., Spínola, R., Mendonça, M. and Santos, J. A Thematic Synthesis on Empathy in Software Engineering based on the Practitioners' Perspective Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. Association for Computing Machinery, (Campo Grande Brazil: ACM 2023), 332–341.

4. Clear, A., Clear, T., Vichare, A., Charles, T., Frezza, S., Gutica, M., Lunt, B., Maiorana, F., Pears, A. and Pitt, F. Designing Computer Science Competency Statements: A Process and Curriculum Model for the 21st Century in Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. (New York: ACM 2020).

5. Clear, A., Parrish, A. and CC2020 Task Force. Computing Curricula 2020 - CC2020 - Paradigms for Future Computing Curricula ACM and IEEE-CS eds. A Computing Curricula Series Report ACM, New York, 2020.

6. Clear, T. THINKING ISSUES: Computing Competencies, Dispositions and the Affective Taxonomy: More Work Still to Do? ACM Inroads, 14,3 (2023), 8–10.

7. Clear, T. THINKING ISSUES: Is Agility a Disposition and Can it be Taught? ACM Inroads, 12,1 (2021), 13–14.

8. Dev. Dev Community. Forem. (2024), https://dev.to/. Accessed 2024 Mar 20.

9. Frezza, S., Clear, T. and Clear, A. Unpacking Dispositions in the CC2020 Computing Curriculum Overview Report. In 50th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. (Uppsala, Sweden: IEEE 2020).

10. Gunatilake, H., Grundy, J., Hoda, R. and Mueller, I. Enablers and Barriers of Empathy in Software Developer and User Interactions: A Mixed Methods Case Study. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. (2024), [just accepted]

11. Gunatilake, H., Grundy, J., Mueller, I. and Hoda, R. Empathy models and software engineering—A preliminary analysis and taxonomy. Journal of Systems and Software, 203. (2023), 111747.

12. Guthridge, M. and Giummarra, M.J. The taxonomy of empathy: a meta-definition and the nine dimensions of the empathic system. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. (2021), 00221678211018015.

13. He, J. Skills Requirements from Junor Software Developer to Senior Developer. Master of Computer and Information Sciences Dissertation. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, 2022.

14. Hussain, W., Clear, T. and MacDonell, S. Emerging Trends for Global DevOps: A New Zealand Perspective. in Cruzes, D. and Sharma, A. eds. Proceedings 2017 IEEE 12th International Conference on Global Software Engineering. (Los Alamitos, California: IEEE 2017), 21–30.

15. Papoutsoglou, M., Wachs, J., & Kapitsaki, G. M. Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development. In 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). (IEEE/ACM 2021).

16. Petersen, K., Feldt, R., Mujtaba, S. and Mattsson, M., Systematic mapping studies in software engineering. in 12th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE). (2008), 1–10.

17. Raj, R., Sabin, M., Impagliazzo, J., Bowers, D., Daniels, M., Hermans, F., Kiesler, N., Kumar, A.N., MacKellar, B. and McCauley, R. Professional Competencies in Computing Education: Pedagogies and Assessment. in Proceedings of the 2021 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. (ACM 2021), 133–161.

18. Schussler, D.L. Defining dispositions: Wading through murky waters. The Teacher Educator, 41, 4 (2006), 251–268.

Author

Tony Clear
School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Auckland University of Technology
Private Bag 92006
Auckland, 1142 New Zealand
[email protected]

Tables

Table 1. Dimensions of Collective Empathy within Software Development Project Teams