New measurement tools aim to capture empathy within software teams and user interactions

Empathy has become recognized as essential to software development outcomes—from helping engineers understand user frustrations to enabling product owners to grasp technical implementation challenges. Yet until now, the field lacked a reliable way to measure empathy in these specific, domain-relevant situations.

The Gap in Measuring Software Empathy#

Existing empathy scales come largely from psychology and healthcare research, relying on scenarios and language that don't translate well to software contexts. A clinical psychologist's measure of empathy, for instance, doesn't capture what it means for a developer to understand a non-technical user's workflow struggles or for teammates to appreciate each other's technical constraints. These generic tools miss the role-specific, domain-bound ways empathy actually manifests in software teams and between practitioners and their users.

Introducing EmpathiSEr#

A team of researchers has developed two purpose-built empathy scales grounded in how software practitioners themselves experience and express empathy. EmpathiSEr-P measures empathy among developers and other team members, while EmpathiSEr-U assesses how practitioners empathize with end users. Both instruments are based on a practitioner-informed framework that breaks empathy into three components: understanding others' emotional and cognitive states (cognitive empathy), sharing those emotional states (affective empathy), and translating understanding into responsive action (empathic responses).

Rigorous Development and Validation#

The researchers followed a structured, multi-phase methodology to build and validate the scales. This included expert review, one-on-one cognitive interviews with practitioners to test how they interpreted the questions, and two separate surveys with software professionals. The result is the first psychometrically validated empathy measurement tool tailored to the software engineering field.

Why It Matters#

These instruments give teams and organizations a concrete way to assess empathy levels and design targeted interventions to strengthen interpersonal dynamics. For researchers studying human factors in software development, the scales offer a standardized tool for quantifying empathy's role in collaboration, communication, and user-centered design outcomes.