LAUSR

During software development software engineers use a variety of tools and platforms to create, analyze, validate, and collaborate on software systems. These tools and platforms contain rich data that has the potential to bring deep insight into both the software systems themselves, and the underlying engineering processes. The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) community is actively working on tools and techniques that analyze these rich data sets. Thanks to readily available version control systems, issue trackers, mailing lists, build logs, and other sources of information from open source projects, repository mining has gained in popularity since the inception of the Mining Software Repositories series in 2004. It continues to be one of the fastest growing fields in the area of software engineering. Researchers in this field empirically explore a range of software engineering questions using software repository data as the primary source of information. Some commonly explored areas include software evolution, models of software development processes, characterization of developers and their activities, use of machine learning techniques on software project data, software bug prediction, analysis of software change patterns, analysis of code clones, mining code review data, and mining execution traces and logs. This special section on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) serves to highlight and elaborate on papers from the 2018 edition of the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. In particular, it features two recent MSR full research papers that touch upon important aspects; one on software evolution and the other on software analytics. The two full research papers were invited and extended with a significant amount of new and substantive materials for journal publication. Each paper was reviewed by three or more reviewers and the authors faced (at least) one major revision. In the following, we briefly discuss the two full research papers. The paper “CDA: Characterising Deprecated Android APIs” by Li, Gao, Bissyandé, Ma, Xia, and Klein introduces CDA, a research-based prototype tool for characterizing deprecated Android Empirical Software Engineering https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-020-09817-8