Agile empathy for the early stage of software design

Abstract

ContextIn Software Engineering, practitioners must understand stakeholders' needs for the software they are designing, which implies achieving empathy.ProblemGrounded in prior empirical work, we identify a research gap at the intersection of three issues. Traditional requirement-gathering practices often fail to support deep empathy with users. In agile contexts, developers’ technology-oriented cognitive style can further bias requirements analysis away from users’ perspectives. Yet empathy training remains underexplored in Software Engineering.ObjectiveThis paper contributes a conceptual framework to design empathy training for early-stage software design by integrating Design Thinking, Agile values, and Experiential Learning. In our proposal, agile empathy is the empathy that can be achieved by combining two resources: Interview to Empathise and Prototype to Empathise in time-boxed sessions with potential users. Thus, the interview insights are translated into rapid prototypes that deepen understanding of users’ needs.MethodsWe conducted an exploratory study of our conceptual framework proposal, which was instantiated with two different settings (e.g. domains). The participants were senior computer science students (N = 32). We used a mixed-method research design. The empathy achieved by the trainees is from the interviewees' perspective, as they respond to a 5-point Likert scale and an open-ended question about their personalised prototypes.ResultsOur exploratory study revealed that trainees achieved partial or total empathy from the interviewees' perspective, even with only one training session. Seventy-eight per cent of the participants are developers with IT industry experience, expanding our findings beyond the classroom.