The IEEE International Conference on Self-Adapting and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) is the main forum for studying and discussing the foundations of a principled approach to engineering systems, networks, and services based on self-adaptation and self-organization. Over the past decade, it has consolidated as the primary scientific conference for sharing ideas on algorithms, technologies, tools, and applications across a wide range of scientific fields. In 2016, the conference was hosted by the University of Augsburg, in Augsburg, Germany; its scientific program comprised full papers, short papers, poster and demo presentations, workshops, doctoral symposium and tutorials. This special issue of ACM TAAS champions some of the most solid research results of SASO 2016, presenting selected, revised, and extended best articles.