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.

翻译：软件工程要求开发人员与利益相关者协作，理解他们的情感和观点往往至关重要。共情是指个体理解并分享他人感受的能力。然而，共情在软件工程中仍是一个研究不足的人因要素。我们通过混合方法案例研究，探究了开发人员与最终用户之间的共情实践。采用共情测试、观察和访谈收集数据，并运用社会技术扎根理论与描述性统计进行分析。我们识别出触发共情所需的认知本质及其促进因素，发现了共情面临的障碍及克服这些障碍的潜在策略。我们报告了新兴关系中的洞见，并为软件从业者和软件工程研究人员提出了一系列关于共情与软件工程的建议及未来研究方向。