Component-based tailorability: Enabling highly flexible softwareapplications

Component technologies are perceived as an important means to keep software architectures flexible. Flexibility offered by componenttechnologies typically addresses software developers at design time. However, the design of software which should support socialsystems, such as work groups or communities, also demands ‘use-time’, or technically spoken, ‘run-time’ flexibility. In this paper, wesummarize a decade of research efforts on component-based approaches to flexibilize groupware applications at run-time. We addressthe user as a ‘casual programmer’ who develops and individualizes software for his work context.[...]