The field of software engineering is moving towards a more holistic approach, incorporating social skills and emotional intelligence into its practices. Researchers are exploring the importance of empathy in software development, highlighting its impact on team dynamics and collaboration. Meanwhile, the quality of test cases and test suites is being reevaluated, with a focus on identifying key attributes and challenges in ensuring high-quality testing. The development of best practices and ontologies for issue tracking ecosystems is also gaining attention, aiming to improve the management of software engineering artifacts and processes. Furthermore, sentiment analysis is being applied to various aspects of software engineering, including developer emotions and internet connectivity in emerging economies. Noteworthy papers include:

• A study on empathy in software engineering, which proposes a conceptual framework for cultivating empathy in teams.
• A thesis on issue tracking ecosystems, which introduces a best practice ontology for addressing context-dependent problems.
• A paper on sentiment analysis in software engineering, which presents a German gold-standard dataset for sentiment analysis.