As in other areas of science and engineering, software engineering knowledge grows incrementally. Program committees are very interested in your interpretation of prior work in the area. They want to know how your work is related to the prior work, either by building on it or by providing an alternative. If you don’t explain this, it’s hard for the program committee to understand how you’ve added to our store of knowledge. You may also damage your credibility if the program committee can’t tell whether you know about related work.