The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field analyzes the rich data available in software repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and projects. Some commonly explored areas include software evolution, models of software development processes, characterization of developers and their activities, prediction of future software qualities, use of machine learning techniques on software project data, software bug prediction, analysis of software change patterns, and analysis of code clones. This special issue provides five recent MSR regular research papers, and, for the first time in the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, three data showcase papers. Each of these data showcase papers describe at length a valuable Software Engineering dataset, in the hope that it allows prospective users of these datasets a smooth start with them. In the following, we first introduce the five regular research papers and then the three data showcase papers.The paper "A Large-Scale Study of Architectural Evolution in Open-Source Software Systems" by Behnamghader, Le, Garcia, Link, Shahbazian, and Medvidovic introduces ARCADE, an architecture recovery framework for conducting large-scale replicable empirical studies of architectural changes across different versions of a software system. Using ARCADE on 23 open-source systems, the authors report several findings that corroborate a number of widely held views about the times, frequency, scope, and nature of architectural changes.

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