Community support for software development in small groups: The initial steps

Communities that support software artifacts are more and more becoming a key success factors for companies and organizations. Members of the community can provide early feedback, patches and support. Following this trend companies release a product under an Open Source license and then sell the support. This paper tries to engineer the process of forming a community around a software artifact in its early stages. We focus our attention in small software such as artifacts produced by small companies or research products where the development is usually carried out by a few developers with limited resources. We present a generic methodology for creating a community around a software project. Our approach has been defined, applied and evaluated in a case study coming from the research filed of distribute applications. Our Empirical results shows that a productive community can be formed in about 4 months and demonstrate the benefit of a reciprocal collaboration between researchers and members of the Open Source community.