Why and How to Substantiate the Good of Our Reverse Engineering Tools?

Researchers and practitioners are usually eager to develop, test and experiment with new ideas and techniques to analyze software systems and/or to present results of such analyzes, for instance new kind of visualizations or analysis tools. However, often these novel and certainly promising ideas are never properly and seriously empirically evaluated. Instead their inventors just resort to anecdotal evidence to substantiate their beliefs and claims that their ideas and the realizations thereof are actually useful in theory and practice.