Principles for Flexible Design Strategies

The paper describes the architectural principles of a database CASE tool that allows more flexible design strategies than those of traditional tools that propose oversimplistic draw-and-generate approaches. Providing this flexibility is based on four basic principles, namely a unique generic specification model that allows the definition of a large variety of specific design products, transformational functions as major database design tools, a toolbox architecture, allowing a maximal independence between functions, and multiple model definition through parametrization of the unique generic model. These architectural characteristics themselves derive from two fundamental paradigms, namely the process-product-requirements approach to model design behaviours, and the transformational approach to system design.