308 ◾ Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work
© 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
associations can be created incrementally, as and when desired. To the extent that they
exist, they enable the automatic construction and maintenance of an underlying model
and the management of consistency as the user draws. Given suitable domain-specic de-
nitions, the tool can provide guidance and checking, but without requiring strict confor-
mance to a rigid metamodel. Users can thus move smoothly between informal exploration
and modeling with varying degrees of formality and precision.
Our interest in exible modeling developed from our observations that business
users working on a prerequirements analysis prefer to use oce ...