Abstract
Software product lines offer an opportunity to benefit from the reuse potential resident within the domain of a software organization. However, to leverage the full opportunities offered by Software Product Lines, their introduction demands to coordinate people and organizational units. This paper offers a solution to support this coordination by investigating how concepts from the area of communities of practices could be applied to software product lines. The expected benefit is that communities offer a more adaptive approach supporting the transition towards product lines. In this paper, we will describe our initial considerations about the building principles for such organizations based on a shared infrastructure for product lines.