[TIPS] How to model enum in Astah

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

Webinar: Using Astah to Explore User Stories through Mindmapping in Agile projects

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

[TIPS] How to create Interface

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

Who wants to meet CEO Kenji in Germany?

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

Astah received “ComponentSource Best Product Award”

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

[TIPS] Exporting diagrams to images using the command line

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

[TIPS] Changing the Font in diagrams

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