Books about “xxx-mapping”

I was recently introduced to Gojko Adzic’s “Impact Mapping” by Tom Poppendieck during Agile India 2013, and impressed by the business goal capturing method as well as how he used mindmapping technique in his method. I myself have been using Mindmapping for a long time, and also published a book “Mindmapping in Agile software development” and an article “Exploring User Wish Through Mindmapping” about mindmapping in software development related area.

So I did a small research on how mind mapping and its variants are utilized in my area(software development, testing, lean thinking, lean startup, design thinking) as far as I know. Here’s the list.

• General Mind Mapping
  • “The Mind Map Book” by Tony Buzan is the bible, also try my favorite ”Mind Maps for Kids“.
  • “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactoring Wetware” by Andy Hunt,   Section 5.8 “Visualize Insight with Mind Maps” introduces mindmapping.
  • Idea Map … “Idea Mapping” by Jamie Nast. Mindmapping with more flexible rules.
• Mindmapping in Software Development
  • “Mindmapping in Agile software developement“(『ソフトウェア開発に役立つマインドマップ』) by me
    Covers a lot of visualization ideas you can use in your software development team.
  • “Mind Map Modeling“(『マインドマップではじめるモデリング講座』) by Tomoharu Asami
    Introduces an interesting idea of using mind mapping for domain modeling before it is formally modeled in UML.
  • “Agile and Iterative Development” by Craig Larman
    mentions “mind maps” and “affinity clustering” as practice tips in Chatper 11.
• Lean(TPS)
  • A3 thinking(Lean) … ”Understanding A3 thinking” by Durward K. Sobek and see also a template by Henrik Kniberg
  • Think in Pictures … “The Elegant Solution” by Mathew May, Chapter 7 “Think in Pictures” covers how Toyota uses pictures to share the product concepts.
• Testing
  • “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin + Janet Gregory uses mind maps for chapter structuring to guide the readers.
  • “Mind Maps As Part Of The Agile Testing Process“ by Martin Mussmann
    Using Mind maps for designing, visualizing the tests and the strategies. I recently found this during the research.
  • “Software Testing with Mind Maps“( 『マインドマップからはじめる ソフトウェアテスト』) by Akira Ikeda and Mikio Suzuki
    Thorough description of software testing process with rich examples of mind maps.
• (Lean) Business and User Experience
  • “Impact Mapping” by Gojko Adzic
    A strategic planning technique for clearly communicating overall business objectives and for making better roadmap decisions.
  • “User Story Mapping” by Jeff Patton
    Big picture of a product vision, with epics, stories, hierachically mapped user stories.
  • “Affinity Diagram” in Design Thinking … I found this in IDEO method cards, but searching for the source, and it comes from Six Sigma tool kit ?!

Some of the above are written only in Japanese, but they are rich in contents compared to others. Hope they are translated into English soon.

Also note that non-radiant structure mapping like “User Story Mapping” by Jeff Patton are included in the above. I guess I need more analysis of categorization, and I also have to add other non-radiant structure like matrix/tabular form in this map, including:

• “Business Model Canvas” described in “Business Model Generation“(and “Business Model Ontology“) by Alexander Osterwalder et, al.
• “Lean Canvas” described in “Running Lean” by Ash Maurya

And here’s the map. (click to magnify or PDF)

Mapping Mapping!

Hello, we’ve released Astah SysML version 1.0 last month and download of its free trial is increasing every day. Thank you! So we decided to host a webinar on July 19th (Fri) at 10:00am EDT to get you started with Astah SysML as quickly and easily as possible by its product owner Yi Zhou.

Yi will be demonstrating how to create SysML diagrams like Block Definition Diagram, Requirement Diagram.etc, with Astah SysML, answer any of your questions and take note of your feature requests.

Message from product owner YI
“Astah SysML has been developed based on user feed-back as much as possible, and we are always looking for new ideas for it. Through this webinar, I really hope to talk with you, answer your questions and talk about feature requests after a quick demo.”

Astah SysML Product Manager / Lead Engineer
Yi Zhou

Date & Time
It starts on July 19th (Fri) at 10:00am EDT (30 – 40 min)
See what time it will be in your time.

How to attend
Simply sign up from the page below. All the information for how to attend will be sent to your email!
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5001718328783081984

Cheers,
SJ

I hosted a following webinar on July 19th about “Introduction to Astah SysML”. Here’s a recorded webinar video uploaded on Youtube:

In this webinar, I created some diagrams to design a part of SUV engine System using Astah SysML. It was my first time to demonstrate Astah SysML to attendees overseas and tried to show a few these points below:
- creating model elements such as attributes by one-click
- creating lifelines automatically just by dragging and dropping a block to Sequence Diagram
- creating constraint parameters in Parametric diagram to show that its parameter will be added to the type constraint block automatically

As a product owner of Astah SysML, I’m proud of our tool Astah SysML with its ease and smooth of the operation and user-friendlyto model.

I hope that my webinar helps you to learn more about Astah SysML. We are offering over 200 day free trial. If you are interested, download from here and try it out.

Astah SysML Download : http://astah.net/editions/sysml/download

Your trial starts right after the installation.

Related contents:
Astah SysML Overview: http://astah.net/editions/sysml
Astah SysML Tutorial: http://astah.net/tutorials/sysml/overview

Thank you.
Yi Zhou

Last week the same question below came in from several users.

“I copied a Class and pasted it on a diagram. But when I modified the copied class, the same change applied to the master copy. Can’t I produce independent models by copy & paste?”

You can create a new model based on existing one by copying but you will have to use ‘Clone’ instead of ‘Copy’. You can find this [Clone] menu in the Structure Tree (Top left pane.) ‘Clone” copies the model and its attributes. Following figure shows cloning a Class A.

Then you can drag and drop the copied model to diagram and modify its name and etc.

On the other hand, ‘Copy’ menu copies its presentation only, not the model itself, so that when you make changes to copied model, the same change applies to the master copy. Following figure shows what ‘Copy’ menu does.

How ‘Copy’ menu works in Astah

Hope this clarifies the difference between ‘Clone’ and ‘Copy’.

Cheers,
SJ

* ‘Clone’ menu is available in Astah Professional edition only and not supported in Astah Community edition.

I want to share my analysis of the “Sushi” domain.

Sushi Taxonomy by UML

• Sushi is constructed by Neta, Rice and sometimes Nori.
• There are several categories of Sushi called, “Shiromi(White fish)”, “Hikarimono(Gleaming fish)”, and Gunkan.
• You eat Sushi with Sake or Agari(tea), Gari, and Shoyu(Soy sause), and Agari, Gari and Shoyu are free.

This is a simplest observation, and I’m happy to hear your comments!

# Several bugs are already reported… like Engawa should be related to Hirame, not to Tai. “Role” should be “Roll” or Makizushi in Japanese.

-Kenji

UML Object diagram

Object diagram is used for representing a relationship between instances. In OMG UML 1.5 specification, it is defined as “a graph of instances, including objects and data values. A static object diagram is an instance of a class diagram; it shows a snapshot of the detailed state of a system at a point in time.” Analyzing the system structure using object diagram is useful in understanding class diagrams clearly.

How to draw Object diagrams in Astah?

Astah doesn’t have an independent menu of “Object diagram” so use Class Diagram.

InstanceSpecification (Object)

To add an object, select “InstanceSpecification” and click on the diagram.

To input the slots, select the InstanceSpecification, go to the left bottom pane called “Property View” then click [Property] button from its [Base] tab.

Configuration dialog box appears, select [Attribute] tab and add its slots from [Add] button.

If you go back to the [Base] tab, all the slots are listed, now add the values in directly.

Line

To create a line between InstanceSpecifications, Simply select [Link] from tool bar or click “L” and draw between InstanceSpecifications, or click “L” which appears when you have mouse over the InstanceSpecification then click another InstanceSpecification to connect to.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
SJ

You can create ER diagrams in Astah Professional edition.

 

ER Data Type

Astah has a set of ER Data Types that are often used, and you can choose one as a default type. In Astah, CHAR is set as default, so when you add an attribute to ER Entity, its data type would be CHAR.
 

How to add ER Data Type

The set of ER Data Types does not cover all the types in the RDBMS, so when you need one not listed,, you can add one by yourself. To do so,

(1) Go to [Tool] – [ER Diagram] – [Set ER Data Type] or select it from [ER Model] packages menu.

(2) [Set ER Data Type] dialog box appears. Click [Add] button and then add a new ER Data Type in a small dialog box.

 
Then added Data Type will appear in the scroll-down list of Attribute’s property view.

You can try out Astah Professional for free for 50 days to create ER Diagrams!
 

Cheers,
SJ

The “Look” of UML diagrams counts. Diagrams that look “clean” increase the clarity of models in visual and that makes it easier for yourself and importantly for the audiences to read and understand the models when you share them than diagrams that look messy.

Alignment Guide

Astah has several features that help creating clean diagrams. Alignment Guide is one for better positioning of model elements, [Alignment] Menu (Align horizontally and vertically) would help aligning specific multiple model elements. And another one is a Grid. By default, grid lines are invisible, so some may not know that you could use it in Astah. Here’s how to show grid and capabilities of what you can do with them.

Show Grid lines

(1) Go to [Tool] – [System Properties] from Main Menu
(2) [System Properties] dialog opens, select [Diagram Editor] from left menu
(3) Click [Show Grid on diagram] and click [Apply] – [OK].

Then Grid appears on diagram editor.

Snap to Grid

The snap to grid function enables model elements to be positioned aligning to the nearest guide line. To enable this function, check [Snap to Grid when using the mouse] option in the [System Properties] – [Diagram Editor].

Grid color and size

You can change the color and size of Grid as you like from the [System Properties] – [Diagram Editor] too.

(Left: Default (Purple, 30 x 30), Center: Blue, 20 x 20 , Right: Grey, 50 x 50)

Astah UML Pad

We have an important announcement to make regarding Astah UML Pad (Astah for iPad edition).

We’ve decided to take Astah UML Pad from AppStore until it is ready for iOS7 because we had found a critical issue in it. So we will take it down from AppStore for now and work on the issue and put it back when we make sure that everything works fine on iOS7. We plan to make it happen in the beginning of November. Not only dealing with the bug fix, we will include some new features too, so please look forward to its new release!

To existing Astah UML Pad users:
You cannot change the diagram names on iOS7. We apologize for the inconvenience.

New features to be added:
- Copy & Paste diagrams
- Save diagram images directly on Photo album
- Retina Support
- Auto-save… and others

Also it will include many bug-fixes (One of them is a problem with exporting to XML when there are Attributes/Operations without names.).

To everyone who is new to Astah UML Pad:
Astah UML Pad is a free and simple UML modeling app supports Class Diagram. Export of XML and image files possible, and our desktop edition Astah Professional can import models from iPad, so that you can start modeling on Astah UML Pad and complete it on your desktop. Check out the demo video to see what it can do!

New release is planned in the beginning of November. Please look forward to it!

Cheers,
SJ

We will be running our website maintenance on Change Vision Members page during the period below.

Sep.28 (Sat) 12:00pm – Sep.29 (Sun) 8:00pm EDT

During this time period, you aren’t able to:
- sign up with Change Vision Members service
- register purchased licenses
- extend trial licenses
- re-issue license key file
- download older version of Astah
- download Free Academic License file

We apologize for the inconvenience. However download of the latest versions of Astah is available from Astah.net during this time period.

Thank you for your understanding.

Astah Development Team

Yesterday, I was invited to PHP Quebec in Montreal, by Anna Filina
and talked about “Agile In the Agile Age”.

I wanted to say that Agile is not about making crappy code fast,
and good design has been and still is an essential part of software
development. And I proposed the simplest set of models to keep updated next to code.

Montreal is a beautiful city with new and old buildings together. We also enjoyed beer and portine. (I haven’t ever eaten such a dense dish with heavy gravy source, cheese and fried potato mixture…)

Thank you, Mathieu for helping me fix the projector, Sylvain for letting us know your map service igreffe, Karolin for introducing us to your kid and husband, Tim for coming with your collegue, Jehad and Thai for the funny conversation we had about Delphi at the metro in the final goodbye moment.

Finally, thanks Anna again, and we missed you, Yann!

-Kenji

On Oct.2, I visited SAP Canada in Montreal, and did a talk about “Creating Knowledge with Users”, which discusses Scrum, Design Thinking, and Mindmapping to show the importance of sharing experience with users to create new ideas.

I visited in June SAP Walldorf(HQ), and did the same talk there(another blog entry here). One of the coordinators there introduced me to Montreal SAP and made this happen.

SAP is now going forward to implement Design Thinking, so I thought this talk would be well accepted to their context. And, because I’m from Japan, I’d like to show something Japanese there.

In the afternoon, with more developers, I talked “Modeling in the Agile Age”.

This talk is the latest talk I’ve been preparing. I want to get back the importance of design and modeling back to Agile.

Thank you very much Steffen and Krista for the coordination and lunch,  and Tim for connecting us(and for coming to PHP Quebec next day to say hello, too).

Here’s Steffen and me, in front of the entrance. We had a wonderful time in Montreal.

-Kenji

At the end of September, we exhibited Astah at JavaOne which was taken place in San Francisco.

During the 3-day exhibition, we had so many Java developers came to our booth that we enjoyed conversations with and introduced a brief of Astah products, a demo video of Astah, 3 reasons to use Astah, we introduced our new white papers below.

“Modeling in the Agile Age”
Agile methods have become mainstream in software development, working code and automated tests are being considered as the most important team artifacts. Is modeling obsolete? Is UML dead?
I’ll explore the spaces where modeling fits and plays an important role in this Agile age, especially when development scales to multiple teams
and a shared understanding of the system’s “Big Picture” becomes essential.

“Continuous Modeling”
“Continuous Modeling” is a periodic activity to share improvement ideas or change model structures within a team to effectively synchronize the “Mental Model” and code base by having a regular short discussion using diagrams.

We’ve got positive feedback to these white papers and it was great hearing what they are looking for in UML modeling tools and learning how much modeling they are doing in their projects..etc. Also we’ve heard many questions about Eclipse Integration, Reverse Engineering, Code Generation, Model exchange with other UML modeling tools etc. Some are yes in Astah Professional and some are not but Toshi is now sorting out all the feedback and planning what to implement in the future release, so if you have any feedback or questions, please get them to us now.

It was also very special to meet Astah users there in person and we enjoyed the visit of familiar faces such as a member of Friend of Astah, Kevin (who was also a speaker at the conference) and Cameron Roe who was a winner of GoldenHammer Contest we threw last year at JavaOne. Here’s the photo of Cam with the GoldenHammer Trophy and Duke’s choice award that he’s won before. (Thanks for the photo, Cam!)

The assignment of the GoldenHammer contest was to create and model the most complicated solution to a simple problem.

Here’s his winning model of app to tell what time it is.

(You can view these diagrams at http://p.astah.net/a/2o7gnbui on Astah Publish)

Too bad that we didn’t have this fun contest this year, but might come back next year.

At last, it was such great exhibition at JavaOne, thank you all very much for stopping by our booth and do not forget to activate the special license! – If you forgot how to do, please send us email.

- SJ

Thanks to Abbey, now GUI in Astah Community can be shown in Chinese.

As Abbey created Chinese one, anyone can create ones for your language (Portuguese, Spanish, German..etc : See how to do so in GUI Localization page)

I asked Abbey how the translation process was like to him and why he made a Chinese translation file etc.

Satomi (S):  Thank you Abbey for creating this Chinese translation files. Before we start, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Abbey (A):  I am a software architect in a small company and our products concentrate on C/S application like HIS, ERP, OA and so on. I live with my parents, wife and two cute children in Sichuan in China.

S:  So do you use Astah at your work?

A : Actually no. We use other tool that our company chose. It has good import/export features but is actually poor to support the express template parameters. Font and color settings are rough and it always has bugs.. I am using Astah Community as my personal tool because it is free, lightweight and offers basic features I need. Since I’ve become a member of Friends of Astah and  received a free license, I am now trying the Astah Professional.

S:  Okay, hope you like Astah’s template parameters and font settings. Then what made you decide to make a Chinese Translation?

A : Months ago, one of my friends asked me for a training of UML of his teammates. I chose Astah Community as the demonstrating tool. Later they asked me if there’s a Chinese edition but there is none, so I decided to make one by myself.

S:  That’s great. How was the experience of making translation? Was it easy? Any problems you encountered?

A : Hardest part was to make a Chinese UML glossary because there is no unified glossary of UML in Chinese. So what I did first was to create English-Chinese glossary table by researching some resources. Step two was to create git repository for the translation files and then last step was to prepare some snacks. Not a problem but testing the translation files was a boring process to be honest, I had to find an editor which can export text in escaped ASCII format. Then run Astah and record every point in-translated over and over..

S:  Oh, that sounds a lot of work. We’ll find a better way for users to create translation files easier. But after you’ve made the translation, did it help people you are teaching UML to?

A : Yes, now it is much easier for them to understand what I am teaching in the class.

S:  Wonderful! Actually we receive many requests for Chinese edition, so  your work will help a lot of Chinese users. So thank you very much for your effort & contribution! At last, I always ask this question.. what is your passion?

A : Photography and soccer! As a game player, I love the WoW after the Lich King was defeated.

S: It is always to have something you like beside your job. At last I remember that you mentioned that you’d make a tool to update your translation files?

A: Yes. I will make one to pick out all the differences in the properties files between versions and also export them in specified format directly. Maybe, it should support Git,,, I think.

S: Wonderful. We have our new release planned already in January. So hopefully you could make one to make it easier to keep translation files updated with new versions accordingly! Thank you so much again, Abbey.

Here’s a little tip for Mac users for how to open two .asta files at the same time on Mac.

Run either command below in Terminal while one Astah is already open.

To launch another Astah:

open -n /Applications/astah\ professional/astah\ professional.app
(Let it point to your Astah app file)

To launch another Astah with a specific file opened:

open -n xxx.asta　(eg: open -n /Users/xxxx/Desktop/Class.asta)

Cheers,
SJ

Have you tried a free code generator plug-in “any<code/>” yet?

This is a work by Mr. José Carreno in France that enables you to generate code from Class diagrams into Java, PHP, C#, Objective-C..etc. This is a great value to all the Astah Community users as currently code generating feature is available in Astah Professional only. Also Astah Professional users will be easily getting a benefit from this plug-in because it exports to other languages than Astah Professional supports (Java, C#, C++ and PHP).

Click image to link to Jose’s plugin page

We were honored to invite José to the Friends of Astah Program for a great contribution he made. And then we wanted to know more about him and why he decided to create this Plug-in etc and share it with Astah users. So here’ a short interview with him.

Satomi (S): Hi José, it is great talking with you. To begin with, could you tell us a bit about yourself? 

Jose (J): I’m a software architect and have been working on web application architecture and development for 8 years in Industry and Insurance segments.

S: All of our team was very excited to receive your code generator Plug-in. Tell us about it, what this does and who this is for..etc?

J: The any<code/> plugin is a model driven engineering extension of Astah that helps developers or architects to code their baseline software architecture from a UML model to any target language through customizable templates.

S: What made you decide to create this Plug-in? What was your motivation?

J: Several years ago, I participated in software development following a MDA approach using AndroMDA framework. Using a UML tool was very effective as the business model to develop wasn’t very simple (more than 50 business entities) and AndroMDA provided nice code generation features. It only lacked a bit of customization features and the ability to generate code to another language than Java. That’s the reason why I wanted to develop a tool that would provide these missing features and I chose Astah as a UML tool for the following three reasons:
- It is a very stable and lightweight UML modelling software
- it can be extended easily thank to its SDK, based on maven and
- it provides a powerful API that enables plugin developer to “play” with UML models

S: I see. Happy to hear those reasons because those are actually two of our
“3 Reasons to choose Astah”. Glad to see that our strengths reached out to you. Now what is the plan with this Plug-in? How do you want it to grow?

Jose’s Roadmap to this Plugin

J: any<code/> is a very “young” project and I regularly have new ideas that add in its Roadmap. I first plan to add built-in templates for PHP, C++ and other languages to reach more and more users.
My final objective would be to extend any<code/> so that it could turn a model into other models (based on XMI), following a true MDA approach with customization features.
I think I’ll keep developing any<code/> until I find a handy way to do that.

S: You’ve set a clear goal and laid out concrete steps. Good luck! And I bet you are a passionate person doing this personal project.

J: I like software development. This plugin is a great experience as it gave me the opportunity to get in touch with Astah team. My best reward would be to make any<code/> useful for many Astah users.
But when I’m away from keyboard, my other passions are my wife and my 8 months kid!

S: Oh how sweet. It is great connecting with you also and our reward would be introducing your plug-in to more Astah users! Thank you so much for sharing your ideas about your plug-in and your thoughtful hearts and passion behind it. Thank you.

Have fun modeling class diagrams on iPad on the latest version of Astah UMLPad 1.1!

Astah UML Pad

The latest version of our UML modeling tool for iPad is optimized for iOS7 and also Retina display.
Here are some new exciting features in the latest version.
- Optimized for iOS7
- Retina display
- Clone existing diagrams
- Save diagram images directly to Photo
- Ability to add stereotypes to Class

New Features in Screenshot

Some bug fixes are made and we let the way to create Aggregations/Compositions more straightforward, so that the latest version gives you not only the fresh optimized design but also the easier and faster experience to model.

Astah UML Pad Diagram Sample

Still any models you create on iPad can be exported to Astah Professional via XML so that you can start modeling on iPad and then take it further to concrete on Desktop.
(Reference: UML Modeling – Start on an iPad and complete it on your desktop)

Download Astah UML Pad 1.1 Free Now!

Though you don’t have iOs7 yet, you can still download UML Pad V1.0.

Cheers,
SJ

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Happy holidays to you all.

We will be closing our office during the period below due to the New Years holidays.

December 28th (Sat) – January 5th (Sun) in Japanese Standard Time

Both of Astah.net and CV Members site will be available throughout the holidays, so that allows you to download Astah, register licenses and submit your support tickets. However all the support tickets submitted during the holiday  and some of the free academic license request will be responded after January 6th (Mon) when we will resume our normal business hours.

Hope you enjoy a wonderful holiday season.

SJ

We have released the update of both C# import and C++ import Plug-ins with some performance improvements and bug fixes!

At the same time, we improved the overall instruction of how to use these Plug-ins so that makes it much easier to use them. These Plug-ins are absolutely free to use.

Download C# Reverse engineering plugin
Download C++ Reverse engineering plugin

Cheers,
SJ