At Agile India 2013, I showed Astah, a mind mapping tool in some sessions. To those who asked me for a free license,

1. Click the image below to jump to Astah Download page and then select your platform to install Astah on(Win, Mac, or Linux).

   Click to download and select from Win, Mac or Linux

2. Apply the license file which is going to be sent to you via email. (Note that you can use Astah for a while without this license file. So you can just try and if you like it, set the license later)
3. Start-up Astah, then follow the menu [Diagram]->[Mindmap].
4. Start creating mind maps !

Here’s a video, how to create a mind map in Astah. Learning shortcut keys is critical to draw mind maps quick. [TAB] to add a child topic, and [RETURN] to add another branch. Try [Shift-TAB] and [Shift-RETURN] to see what happens. Also there are pre-set template of mind maps you can choose from for the first branches.

Please let me know if you were in the Agile India 2013 conference and got interested in the mindmapping tool and haven’t received the email from me yet.

And also note that Astah is not only for mindmapping. It is a COMPLETE UML editor with ER(database) diagrams, DFD(data flow), flowcharts, state machines, sequence diagram, etc. And there is a web browser version “Astah Share” to share diagrams among your team (Astah Share Concept / Astah Share Download).  Please enjoy !

Get Astah app for Free

We have an UML modeling app called “Astah UML Pad” for iPad for free. We receive positive feedback and questions from users every day and one of the most frequently asked questions is “How do I create aggregations/compositions?”. So I will show you how to create them here using a sample diagram.

Let’s use this diagram below and draw it on Astah UML Pad. (You can download Astah UML Pad free from here.)

P.44 of UML Superstructure Specification, v2.4.1 by OMG – http://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.4.1/

1. Create four classes first, then create one association from [Window] to [Slider]. Tap the [Window] class so that 4 icons appear. Tap the green icon and then drag it to the [Slider] class to create an association.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2. As the association is created, 4 green icons should appear for you to specify the association types. Select the top left one – association (One in red box in the image below).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

3. Tap the association line you just created. 3 icons should appear, tap the blue one to open a box where you can set the information of the association.

 
4. Select the composition here and set the other information on this box, tap out side of the box when completed.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

5. Repeat the same for the other models, and the completed diagram should appear like below.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

If you want to modify this diagram further, you can import models from iPad to Astah Professional. (Read UML Modeling – Start on an iPad and complete it on your desktop)
If you don’t have an Astah Professional edition, you can try it out for 50 days for free!

Cheers,
SJ

We updated the System Requirements accordingly with the latest release of Astah 6.7.

Updated System Requirements for version 6.7

As you may have noticed, Astah 6.7 requires OS X Lion 10.7.5 or later and no longer supports Snow Leopard. This is because Astah is moving to Java 7 after receiving Oracle’s news of End of Public Updates of Java 6 and Oracle is supporting Java 7 only on Mac OS X 10.7 and above.

If you are using the Snow Leopard, please use the Astah 6.6.4 which is the latest version that can work on Snow Leopard.
- Astah Professional 6.6.4 (Download / Release Note)
- Astah Community 6.6.4 (Download / Release Note)

Thank you very much for your understanding.

Cheers,
SJ

We have released Astah version 6.7 with new features and over 40 bug-fixes.
We’ve measurably increased the speed of operation especially when you are using a file that contains hundreds of Classes. Astah 6.7 works much faster to enable you to modify more information your diagrams quicker.
Below is a list of some of the new functions/improvements made in 6.7.

SVG Export got easier.

- Improved System Properties
- Easier Plug-in Install
- Easier SVG Export
- Astah Newsfeed
- Icon Update
- New Shorcut keys
- More API Extension

Check out the details at New Features 6.7 page.

Astah Professional 6.7  - Download / Release Note
Astah Community 6.7    - Download / Release Note
Astah UML 6.7 (For existing users)   -  Download / Release Note

If you are using Astah Community edition, but want to try out Astah Professional, simply visit Astah Professional’s download page and download the 50-day free trial there. (How to get full 50-day trial of Astah Professional)

For Mac user, please read the Astah’s System Requirement Update for Mac

Cheers,
SJ

This is a guest blog post by Haim Michael from Israel – a founder of Life Michael, an OMG Certified UML Professional and also a member of Friends of Astah.

Introduction of OOP Analysis and Design Course

Syllabus of his OOP Analysis & Design Course

During spring 2013, I deliver the OOP Analysis & Design course in Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. This course is delivered as part of Shenkar’s Software Engineering B.Sc. Academic Program. The course starts with covering the main UML diagrams, continues with a deep coverage for the classic design patterns in object oriented programming and concludes with advance topics including aspect oriented programming and software development principles such as single responsibility, liskov substitution and dependency inversion.

UML tools to use in the course

There are many UML tools out there in the market. Unfortuneately, only few of them were developed in accordance with the official UML specifications that OMG maintains. Astah is one of them.

Why I chose Astah Professional for students

The intutitive user interface and the excellent implementation for the UML specification are the main reasons for selecting Astah for my students.

Best,
Haim

Today we released Astah SysML Beta 0.9 with many bug-fixes and a few improvements below.

1. New model elements added on Tool menu
Notes with rationale and problem stereotypes are now on the tool menu of all of the diagrams except Mind Map to enable you to make those with one click.

2. Opening a Parametric Diagram from Block
Now you can open a related Parametric Diagram directly from Block’s pop-up menu.

Major changes from previous version (For existing Astah SysML Beta users)
 
1. Change of file extension
Since version 0.9, the file extension has changed to “.asml”. In order to load existing .asta files made with earlier versions, please change the file extension to “.asml” then load. In case the file contains diagrams and models that version 0.9 no longer supports such as Class diagrams, loading may fail. In that case, please delete those from the file and try again.

2. Mac and Linux not officially supported
We still provide installers for Mac and Linux however those aren’t fully tested. So please send us feedback if you encounter any problems on Linux or Mac.

3. A few features under [Tool] have been removed
A few features have been removed from the [Tool] menu such as RTF document and HTML exports. These are still in development and not quite ready for beta testing yet.

4. Extended trial license changes
A license file for Astah Professional will no longer apply to Astah SysML and a specific license file will be required for a longer trial. If you’d like one, please let us know.

We’ve already emailed a new trial license file to existing Astah SysML Beta users. If you didn’t receive it, please let us know.

We’d love to hear your feedback, please let us know what you think about Astah SysML, feature requests, etc.

Download: Astah SysML 0.9 Beta

Cheers,
SJ

In Astah Professional, UML, SysML (Beta) editions, you can change the font of model elements in the [Font Chooser] dialog. There are two ways to open the [Font Chooser] dialog.

Font setting dialog in Astah

A) From Property View
Right-click the root package in the structure tree and then select [Set Font]

B) From Property View
Select the root package in the structure tree and then go to its Property view (The bottom left pane) and then click the Default Font button.

 
When the Font chooser box first opens, all of the top check boxes are ticked with the default setting. Uncheck them in order to choose your preferred font style. Also checking [All Available Font Families] box will show all the font styles that you can select.

 

 
If you are using the free edition, download free trial of Astah Professional to try it out.

Cheers,
SJ

You can export diagrams as PNG/JPEG/EMF/SVG by using the command line in Astah. (EMF/SVG export is available in Astah Professional and Astah UML editions only.)

Example:
Exporting all the diagrams of C:\Astah_Sample.asta file into C:\Astah Diagrams as PNG.

Images will be exported in the specified folder (C:\Astah Diagrams in this example).

Structure tree in Astah_Sample.asta

Each diagram will be stored under the packages which will be automatically created where the diagrams belong to accordingly. See the tree structure of this .asta file in the right figure, for example, an image of Activity Diagram will be exported under the [Activity] folder.

You can export all the diagrams at once or choose which diagram types you want to export by using the following options.

-image
all: All of the diagrams
cl: Class Diagram
uc: UseCase Diagram…etc

-t/-type
png, jpg, emf or svg

Please refer to the Command Line Tool User Guide (CommandRunner.html file in the Astah Installation folder) for all the options.

- If you are using the free edition and would like to try out the EMF/SVG export, download free trial of Astah Professional.
- You can browse (and download) this sample .asta file through Astah Publish here.

Cheers,
SJ

We got this “Top 25 Product” Award!

Hello Astah users,

I’m humbly proud to announce that our product Astah Professional received today a “ComponentSource Top 25 Best Selling Product Awards 2012-2013 Worldwide.”

We have been serially receiving this award since 2009, so this is our 4th award winning. Every year Harry Kelly, Managing Director at ComponentSource, informs me this exciting news and it always makes my day. I’m so glad that this product keeps selling worldwide for this long time. Thanks, Harry!

A little bit of a short history here. I started selling Astah in Japan first — back then it was called JUDE (Java UML Developers’ Environment) — and around 2006 I started thinking of how I can extend our user base and sell this thing outside of Japan.

Scott Sata(佐多さん)

I was first introduced to Mr. Scott Sata (CEO of ComponentSource K.K. in Japan), via Iwakiri-san at Shoeisha, and we together started working on branding this product to extend our market worldwide.

Harry Kelly, UK

Along the way, I got to visit Harry Kelly in London, the sender of the award email above, and received a lot of practical advice on how to make sales better and how to make our customers happier, based-on real figures of our product sales (over a nice lunch Scotch ). They are a real *worldwide* reseller and have a lot of expertise in establishing the brand in the developer’s components and tools world.

Thank you, Sata-san and Harry again. We couldn’t have achieved this result without your generous engagement and collaboration.

-Kenji

CEO, Kenji Hiranabe is coming to Germany in June to attend the two events below.

1. Scrum Day (June.11-12)

Kenji will be attending as a special guest to talk Prof. Ikujiro Nonaka aka “the grandfather of Scrum”‘s original ideas in “his Scrum” and other literature which have not been implemented in the “modern Scrum” (Agile software development) and explore the ideas further to understand why and how Scrum works.

2. OMG meeting (June.17-21)
Kenji will talk and share the experience on how to effectively use both SysML and Assurance Case (D-Case) for an RTC (Robotic Technology Component)-based robotic application, with a short demonstration of our SysML tool, Astah SysML.

3. Also…

During his stay in Germany, he’ll be willing to meet Astah users in person, attend any user groups, seminars or meetups (any size, in-house or public). If you are interested in meeting him in person or/and passionate to organize events with him, please contact us. We’ll be happy to be in it and make the most of it.

He is a frequent speaker of international conferences with the topics below, especially in Agile conferences (Agile Brazil / Agile India)
- Agile
- Scrum
- Lean (TPS)
- UML, SysML modeling,
- Use of Mind mapping in Agile modeling,
- Project visualization and facilitation…etc

You can see some of his interviews/articles/presentations at Meet our CEO page.

Looking forward to hearing from many of you!

Cheers,
SJ

We’ve received feedback as below:

“I’m satisfied with Astah so far. It’s intuitive and easy to use. One of the improvements is to provide default button for interface and abstract class (instead of putting stereotype to define interface and abstract class). Or maybe I miss this button.”

How to create Interface
Actually there is a default button to create Interface. Let’s open a Class diagram and see the tool bar there. There is a button to create Interface in Class notation directly.

You can draw Interface, Interface in Class notation, Required Interface and Provided Interface from this button.

Select “Interface [Normal]” then click on the diagram, an Interface will be created.

How to define abstract
You can go to the Class’s Property view and specify it as abstract or not in its [Base] tab. After setting the Abstract as “true”, the Class name will be shown in italic.

You may know this already but you can add the stereotype from Class’s property view as well.
1. Create a Class and open its Property View
2. Go to [Stereotype] tab and then click [Add]

3. A list of stereotype appears, select “abstract”.

 
 

Cheers,
SJ

You are invited! 
We’re hosting a free webinar that promises to have a big impact on how you, our community, can make the most of both Mind Mapping and Astah. Specifically, the webinar, hosted by our founder and CEO Kenji, will explore the User Wish.

Abstract
Gathering and writing good user stories is always challenging. There are no standard processes or notations available to help gather them from the users. Without strong interpersonal communication and facilitation skills, the process can fail, leading towards lack of understanding of what the users really wish. In this talk, I try to show a path to overcome these obstacles. Through the simplicity and serenity of mind mapping, we will explore the “User Wish” – a vague shape of requirements before they are formalized. And turn them into user stories or use cases.

Here’s an article that he wrote about this topic on StickyMinds.com:
Agile Modeling with Mind Map and UML

When?
May 8th at 11:00am EST. (See what time it will be in your area?)

Sign up for webinar from here!

How to attend?
Just sign up from here.

About the speaker – Kenji
Kenji Hiranabe is the founder and CEO of Change Vision. His experience and exposure has led to international recognition as an expert in Agile and Scrum Development. He is a winner of the Gorden Pask award, which is given to people who make significant contributions to Agile practices. Kenji is also a highly sought-after speaker, especially for Agile events and topics. Some of the events he has lent his voice to are: Agile 2007, Agile 2008, Agile Brazil 2011 and Agile India 2013..etc. Find out more about Kenji by visiting the Meet our CEO page of our website.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Cheers,
SJ

You can model enum in Astah – available in Astah Professional edition only.

How to model enum in Astah

1. Select the root package which is the project name in the Structure tree, and then go to the property view (the left bottom pane) which has various options you can set to this file. Open [Project Setting] tab and check the modeling language(s) you’d like to model with.

2. Select a Class in the Structure Tree or directly on the diagram, then go to its Property view, open [Language] tab and then tick <<enum>> to enable you to model an Enum.

Same as Attributes, select an Attribute and then go to [Language] tab in its property view and tick <<enum>>.

Hope this helps.
You can use Astah Professional for 50 days for free if you’d like to try it out from here:
Download Astah 50-day free trial 
 
Cheers,
SJ

I was invited by Jean Pierre Berchez(JP) as a “guest speaker” at Scrum Day 2013, held on 12th of June, 2013 in Berlin,  It was my great to honer and I was very humbled to talk at such a big and highly considered conference in Germany.

This time, my session was Nonaka’s Scrum: People as the Conveyor of Knowledge.

Prof. Ikujiro Nonaka is called, “the grandfather of Scrum”, because he wrote an article “The New New Product Development Game“(1986) and coined the word “Scrum.”( I wrote a blog post about how Nonka and Jeff Sutherland met.)  In this session I shared some of Nonaka’s original ideas in “his Scrum” (and other literature) which have not been implemented in the “modern Scrum” (Agile software development) and I explored the ideas further to understand why and how Scrum works. They includes “SECI-model” or how tacit and explicit knowledge transform each other into innovation, and why “Design Thinking” (or empathy to the users through experience, or in his word “socialization”) should be inserted to the first part of the PDCA loop.

Just after my talk, Jeff Sutherland did a Keynote.

Jeff Sutherland keynote

While I were there, interesting topics I attended includes;

Jens Korte
Agile Babelfish – Der Kampf gegen die Babylonische Sprachverwirrung

Jens and me

Jens Talking

It was in German, so I really didn’t understand what he was talking about, but it was interesting that he said some Japanese words Inu, Neko, Unko(which means Dog, Cat, and Poop!). No wonder his wife is a Japanese.

Boris Gloger
Das Scrum Prinzip – agile Organisationen aufbauen und gestalten

Boris is an old friend of mine, I believe we first met at Agile Development Conference 2003 in Utah, US. I’m glad I heard a lot of good things about Boris educating and coaching software engineers and management in Germany.

Uta Kapp; AllScout
Agile Improvement - Teams brauchen emotionale Intelligenz

Uta’s Happiness metrics

She gave me a set of cards like “planning poker cards” to gather happiness metrics in the team. Here’s her blog post. This idea is also talked about by Jeff in his blog post.

I felt good energy from this German Scrum community, thank you again and Happy birthday, JP!!

-Kenji

Hello, my name is Yi Zhou.
I am the product owner of Astah SysML. I’ve been developing Astah family products for about 9 years and I’m pleased to announce the first product release of Astah SysML today. Our main focus on this version was to provide users the easiest and intuitive way to create SysML diagrams.

Try Astah SysML 1.0 for free for 20 days – and then you can extend your trial period longer. As we are developing Astah SysML by Agile product project management practice, we’d like your feedback to make Astah SysML perfectly suited for our users.

At last, below is a nice endorsement we happily received from Mr. Richard Mark Soley who is a chairman and CEO of OMG:

“SysML is already the industry standard for engineering large, complex systems; more safety and quality system development teams are rapidly adopting the language every day. Now every engineering specialty, from mechanical, to electronic to software engineering have a common language to design safe, complex systems architectures. We are pleased to welcome Astah to the fold, a unique modeling tool from Japan, from leading OMG member Change Vision.”  - Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO of OMG

Thank you.

Yi Zhou

Visiting SAP

SAP in Walldorf

Kenji Talks Scrum at SAP

On June 14, I was invited to SAP in Walldorf via Christian Geldmacher, Tobias Hildenbrand, Christian Wiele and Nabi Zamani to talk again about “Nonaka’s Scrum” after Scrum Day 2013 in Berlin.

But this time, My talk was focused more on the ”tacit knowledge – explicit knowledge transformation” or how “empathy” for users works to convey more rich information from the users to the developers, and its connection to “Design Thinking.”

Explaining Tacit Knowledge

I also talked about “Exploring User Wish through Mindmapping” as a more concrete solution to communicate with users and capture their “wish” as a form of mindmap.

My Talk

So my talk became a two parter.

“Creating Knowledge With Users”

• Part I: Nonaka’s Scrum: People as the Conveyor of Knowledge
• Part II: Exploring User Wish Through Mindmapping

And here’s the abstract:

As Agile development became the mainstream of software development, many have been finding that it is just a way of creating software right, not the right software. What we really need is knowledge about users, motivations, information of the needs and the market which are not foreseen at the beginning of the development. “Lean Startup” and “Design Thinking” both address the same issue correctly, but here, I have another philosophy from Japan, which I believe you will enjoy the most.

(if you were in the session and would like to see the slides, please contact me at kenji.hiranabe atmark change-vision dot com, so I can send you a digital copy.)

SECI model

Here’s the one-page description of the SECI-model or how knowledge is created by Ikujiro Nonaka, which is divided into four phases.

• Socialization (Taci toTacit) – Sharing and creating tacit knowledge through direct experience
• Externalization (Tacit to Explict) – Articulating tacit knowledge through dialogue and reflection
• Combination (Explicit to Explicit) – Systemizing and applying explicit knowledge and information
• Internalization (Explicit to Tacit) – Learning and acquiring new tacit knowledge in practice

Expert Discussion

Agile practices mapped onto SECI model

From the Mindmapping to user story mapping

In the afternoon, we had an expert discussion session attended by internal practitioners and coaches, to discuss those ideas further. Christian facilitated the discussion, and started with identifying Agile and Design Thinking practices in the SECI-model.

Then we discussed how we can complementary use mindmapping and user story mapping. We had a very productive discussion. These pictures show it was!

1. Mindmaping can capture a user interview session as a one-page picuture.
2. Mindmaping can convey user empathy during the user interview session in a semi-structured format plus pictures or videos.
3. The user story mapping is a more formal (compared to mindmapping) structure and express the big picture of the stories.
4. User story mapping with persona also developes user empathy.

So my idea to combine mindmapping and user story mapping is to use a mindmap as a “bucket” for one interview session for later creation of a user story map.

A user interview mindmap is more contextual and semi-structured, on the other hand a user story map is more formatted and structured. From the viewpoint of SECI-model,

• Use user interview mindmapping for knowledge externalization
• Use user story mapping for knowledge combination

Afterthought

Note that the “why-who-when” framework I used in the session is just an example of user interview. Other question or topic framework can be prepared to form a semi-structure interviews, discussions, planing, and etc.

Persona (“PAM” is the name)

For example, when you are developing a persona, here’s a persona mindmap by Suzanne and James Robertson(source: “Mastering the Requirements” Process ,1999).

In Astah, we prepare a lot of other “thinking frameworks”, and some organizations are developing their own frameworks and keep them as assets of their explicit knowledge.

Here are some examples (in Astah).

Last of all, I was so humbled to be invited to talk with the experts at SAP. Thank you very much for the precious time we spent there. Hope I can come back there again to talk sometime soon or next year (or even next week .)

We had our first webinar in May with a topic of “Exploring User Wish through Mindmapping” by our CEO Kenji Hiranabe.
Finally our recorded video is available on youtube. If you had missed it, check it out.

It is a 58:28 long video starts with an introduction and flows as below:
1: Agenda at 4:20
2: What is a Mind Map and Why & exploring user wish through mind mapping at 12:05
3: Mind map samples using Astah at 30:15
4: Demo of user wish exploration using Astah at 37:50
5: Conclusion at 45:10
6: Q&A at 48:40

Click here to view Kenji’s full slide

As Kenji says in his video, he was running of time so had to skip some of his slides, so here’s the full slide that he used in his webinar.

If you’d like to try user wish gathering using Mindmap, use a free trial license of Astah Professional. Your free trial starts right after the installation. (See How to get a full 50day free trial.)

Please feel free to send us your feedback on this webinar or this topic in general.

Cheers,
SJ

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To celebrate the launch of Astah SysML, we are providing an additional 270-day free trial license after the initial 20-day free trial that comes with the installer of Astah SysML. Here’s how to get 270-day free license!

1. Download Astah SysML. Choose the icon of your platform.

2. Launch Astah then your first 20 day free trial starts. (See “How to run Astah on Linux“ for the setup on Linux.) Then dialog below appears to tell you the free trial expiry date.

3. After your 20 day trial, an alert appears and ask you to set the purchased license or apply for an evaluation license. So click [Evaluation License] button.

4. You will be taken to this page below on your web broswer. Fill out your name, email address and a comment for us or Astah to get 270-day extension on your trial.

5. An extended trial license will be sent to you shortly via email. To set it up, launch Astah, select [Set License Key] (The top button on the dialog at step.3) and you are all set!

Enjoy the free trial of Astah SysML and plus we are offering a 50% discount for Astah SysML licenses throughout 2013. Please take an advantage of this long free trial to make sure it fulfills your needs and purchase it with half-off price!

Cheers,
SJ