If you want better empirical research, value your theory: On the importance of strong theories for progress in empirical software engineering research

Scientific progress comes from creating sound theories. However, current software engineering still mostly falls short of this goal, although its importance is widely accepted. Thus, in this paper, we discuss the importance of a successful interaction of empirical research with a strong theoretical basis and the ramifications this has. In particular, we will extensively discuss the implications on theory building and the empirical vs. theory interaction, etc. While not everything we will discuss is novel, we present a number of insights, which we at least did not see in software engineering literature. We strongly believe that a careful consideration of the insights discussed in this paper has the potential to lead to a significant improvement in software engineering research.