Our paper “Uncovering Theories in Software Engineering” was accepted in the Second Workshop on a General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE), collocated with ICSE 2013. One of the key points that we make in this paper is that SE research already has bits of theories, that we call Theory Fragments, and we adopted a framework offered by Brinberg and McGrath that can help to dissect papers so as to identify those fragments. You can find a preprint of the paper here.