Although feature-based design is a promising approach to fully integrating CAD/CAM, current feature-based design approaches seldom provide methodologies to easily define and design features. This paper proposes a new approach to integrating parametric design with feature-based design to overcome those limitations by globally decomposing a design into a set of features and locally defining and positioning each feature by geometric constraints. Each feature is defined as a parametric shape which consists of a feature section, attributes, and a set of constraints. The generalized sketching and sweeping techniques are used to simplify the process of designing features. The proposed approach is knowledge-based and its computational efficiency in geometric reasoning is improved greatly. Parametrically designed features not only have the advantage of allowing users to efficiently perform design changes, but also provide designers with a natural design environment in which they can do their work more naturally and creatively.