Kyle Miller and Matt Hodges kindly hosted my blog at Atlassian’s blog site.

Hello from Japan!

Astah UML editor

We are proud to announce that we have just released “Astah UML Macro Plugin for Confluence“. This is our first plugin release from Change Vision that integrates Astah with Atlassian products. Have you ever heard of the name “Astah”?If you are using Confluence and UML diagrams in your project, this plugin is for you! Astah is a full-featured UML2.x standalone editor used worldwide by 400,000 users. And now this plugin allows you to easily insert diagrams created with Astah into Confluence. Inserting diagrams is intuitive and easy, just like inserting Word or Excel files into Confluence. (More …)

I’d like to thank Jonathan Nolen for suggesting us to develop this plugin, Joseph Clark for replying about our development question, Sean Osawa for introducing us to Atlassian, and Kyle Miller for hosting this blog and this partnership.

We once visited the nice Atlassian’s San Francisco office, but I heard you’ve moved from Alabama Stree to Harison Street. I’d like to visit you at the new office, soon. See you!

P.S.
We are also very eager to collaborate with more Atlassian products, including the next JIRA 5.

Kenji

One of Astah development members, Sho Ito (@shoito) has created a new Plug-in which enables you to import FreeMind maps(.mm) to Astah.

How to import FreeMind map to Astah
1) Download the Plug-in from Import FreeMind to Astah
2) Save the ”mm2asta-x.x.x.jar” file in the Astah Installation Folder/plugins
3) Launch Astah (If you don’t have Astah yet, download Astah Professional or Astah UML)
4) Go to [Tool] – [Mindmap] – [Import FreeMind files] and then select your .mm file (You can import multiple files at once!)

How to uninstall
Simply delete this Plug-in file (mm2asta-x.x.x.jar) from Astah Installation Folder/plugins

NOTES
- This Plug-in is available in Astah Professional or Astah UML version 6.5.1 or later
- Currently import of Notes/color setting/User defined icons/HTML/etc are not supported

SAMPLES
Importing “FreeMind_Resources.mm” file to Astah Professional.

FreeMind Map (FreeMind_Resources.mm)

Imported to Astah

More Plug-ins to come in very near future! Keep yourself updated with us on our Plug-in page or like us on our Facebook page!

Cheers,
SJ

Free Mind Map Import Plug-in: http://astah.net/features/freemind-import-plugin

Model libraries for android

One of Astah developers, Akira created a template file (.asta) for Android developers which provides class libraries.

Android API Level: 15 (4.0.3):
http://astah-users.change-vision.com/public/template/android-15.asta

This is available in
- Astah Professional
- Astah UML
- Astah Community

Model version of this file is 34. (Available to open in Astah version 6.4 or later)

How to add this file to Template list
1. Download the template file(.asta) file from the URL above and save it in the Astah installation folder/template/project
2. The template file “android-15.asta” will be added in the template list and can be opened from [File] – [New By Template] menu

Opening it from "New By Template"

My new year hand writing

Every year, I hand-writing some words (a Japanese custom for new year’s resolution) on the second day of January. This year I tried an English version! (usually, it is written in Chinese characters or Japanese.)

Live Your Life

We experienced a huge disaster in Japan last year. I read new year’s greetings post cards and found that a lot of people in Fukushima had not been able to come back home yet. I realized again that this “life” is just once and you cannot control it. But it is given to all people and you can choose what to focus on.

We have been developing astah*, the software design tool and my dream is to make it the world’s most loved tool for developers. I’ll keep this dream in my mind and will spend this whole new year.

I experienced a lot of things last year. I visited Brazil, New York City, Cleveland, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and a lot of other places to see and talk with our customers and users.

And thank you very much to all the “Friends of Astah“, who have become new supporters. This year, so many people joined to the list, including;

• Kent Beck – USA … creator of Extreme Programming(at three river institute)
• Lisa Crispin – USA … co-author of “Agile Testing“
• Johannes Kuah – Singapore … “Software is Hard” blog
• Haim Michael – Israel … Jump start learning courses at abelski
• Carmen Brando – France … Using astah for Geographic Information Science at COGIT Lab.
• Helder Cesar -Brazil … Using astah in a project at UNESP
• Martin Aarnoudse -Netherlands … Delphi system engineer and web site creator at JMAdesign
• José Augusto Fabri – Brazil … Professor of software engineering at UTFPR and software engineering blogger
• John Greenhow – Australia … Technical architect at an investment bank
• Connor Doyle – USA … EnMast.org: Open Source Framework for Multi-Agent Machine Learning
• Andrzej Wislowski – Poland … NotJust4Java
• Premnath, KN – India … R&D Specialist at Nokia Siemens Networks, specialized in self-organizing network.
• Klaus Hinderer – Germany … Modelle und mehr 
• Randal Peters – Canada … teaching software engineering at Red River College, Winnipeg, Manitoba

And from open-source projects;

• Giovanni Azua -Switzerland … PerfectJpattern: Reusable, Type-safe componentized Java Design Patterns
• Hugo van der Ze -Brazil … Cyclos: On-line banking system with e-commerce, communication and etc. tools.
• Ireneuz Pastusiak -Poland … UML2TC: Conversion from Astah UML Activity Diagram to Test Cases
• Jerome Raduget (project owner) -France … KaleidoFoundry: Simple and extensible java integration framework:

I’m very humbled that so many people worldwide are interested in our tool astah and actually using it in their projects. I’d like to visit every one of you some time !

And my last year’s special thanks to Sean Osawa for connecting us to Atlassian, Hugo Corbucci for inviting me to Agile Brazil, Fabricio and Prof. Carlos(Biluka) for inviting me to UENP in Bandeirantes Parana, Anderson Tadeu Milochi and Mauricio Pimentel for welcoming me at BandTec in Sao Paulo, Brian Noll for the great discussion we had in New Jersey, Bruno Guicardi for the tour of your Agile projects at Ci&T in Campinas, Alex and Scott for creating such a neat English web site with us.

This list goes on but I know all of you here are living your dream … I like talking with people who are living their lives with passion.

I wish you all a very happy new year.

-Kenji

Especially because this year we had the most number of interactions with users in the past 5 years since the launch of Change Vision. To us who value the communications with users the most, this was a very exciting outcome and to myself as a customer/tech support, I am filled with gratitude to have been able to connect with many users and receive feedback.

Here are some of what we’ve done in 2011.

- Communication Side
1. Renewed Astah website – Got clean with better navigation
2. Opened Astah Facebook page – Share the latest news
3. Started Astah Blog
4. Launched Friends of Astah program — Was such a great start to contribute Open source projects by providing free licenses and to open more opportunities to talk to the users, listen to them and learn how they use Astah and how they’d like Astah to be. Now we have 40 friends and still accepting more applications! Apply

- Astah Development Side
1. Mac OSX and Linux official support
2. Plug-in Support
3. Free web sharing service, Astah Publish
4. Plug-in with Atlassian Confluence (Demo clip below)
(A Plug-in with Atlassian JIRA will be coming out in 2012! Stay tuned!.)

We strongly value user’s feedback since the launch of Astah. Improvements are constantly implemented based on them and we provide API and Plug-in development kit to open a capability to create their own Plug-ins to maximize the use of Astah to meet their own needs.

So please feel free to reach out to us and let us know what you think about Astah and share how you would like to use it with us. Hope we will hear more from you in 2012, and that will lead Astah to where it is supposed to be.

At last, here’s my personal remarkable memory of 2011
1. NY and NJ trip to Visit Astah customers
2. Lots of heartwarming messages from users — I do enjoy communicating with all the users through email, bug reports, community site forum via any mediums. This year, the number of mails in my mail box has remarkably increased and it includes such nice offer to create Astah demo clips in their own language (Dutch, Portuguese..etc), an invitation to visit their school in Brazil (Kenji visited there and this came true), and an invitation to have a beer with them in Germany – Hopefully all will come true in near future.

2011 has been awesome thanks to all of our users. Thank you all very much.

We’ll keep our best to make our tool and support to be the best for you.

Happy holidays and happy new year.

SJ

This is an announcement to inform you that we are closing our office during the period below due to the New Years holidays.

December 29th, 2011 – January 4th, 2012  (Japanese Standard Time)

Both of our website and CV members site will be available throughout the holidays, so that allows you to download Astah/update to the latest, manage your license and submit your support ticket and etc.

However all the support tickets submitted during the holiday will be responded after January 5th when we will resume our normal business hours on.

Hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday season.

SJ

As you know, we are constantly refining our software to improve your experience, based in large part on your comments, suggestions and bug reports. In our most recent release, we have some new features to share with you:

•  We have added new APIs designed to specifically allow you to get more information of models to help you to develop your own Plug-ins for Astah
• Added more APIs that allow you to make more detailed diagrams, such as Mind Maps with boundaries and customized icons, or show nested relationships
• Now you can export diagram images with astah-command.bat in Astah Community
• Software Update Check and the Usage Data Reporting will run concurrently, and more efficiently
• Bug fixes

Astah presentation by 4bytes at BandTec : Photo by BandTec's Flickr page

On November 1st, at an annual event at BandTec in Sao Paulo Brazil, Fabricio from 4 bytes, Inc. gave a talk about “Using Astah as a Software Engineering platform with UML and Mind Mapping” with other two (Thiago and Ricardo).

It was the 4th of “Techweek” that BandTec takes place once a year to invite professionals in the IT industries and give talks what’s happening in the IT world, trends, technology and practices to the students.

About Techweek on BandTec’s blog (In Portuguese) http://bandtec.blog.br/2011/10/31/faculdade-bandtec-promove-a-iv-techweek/

In their talk, Fabricio stated an importance of UML and the power of acceleration of Mind Mapping’s to the process of application development using case studies of Movie rental store with Astah Professional generating Mind Map, UseCase, ER Diagrams, SQL export and also export of C# and Java source code from Class diagrams. They also showed a demo of Astah for iPad which got positive feedback from the audience which we are pleased to hear.

To tell you a bit of connections between the speakers, Fabricio, Thiago and Ricard from 4 bytes, Inc. and us, they are enthusiastic students at UENP and long-time Astah users. Especially, Fabricio invited Kenji to his school this summer where Kenji had a big warm welcome and gave a session at. (See Memories of UENP in Bandeirantes)

Kenji and Coordinator Maurício Pimentel in front of BandTec

Kenji also visited BandTec where is one of the schools that installs Astah for their classes with Faculty Site License to hear how Astah has been used. It is humbling to see how they got connected. Thank you all at 4Bytes, Inc for the lecture using Astah and BandTec for providing such wonderful opportunity.

Cheers,
SJ

We are very happy to have it all updated with new fresh design before this up-coming event, CodeMash (Held January 11-13, 2012 in Sandusky, Ohio) where we will have our booth at! (We are a gold sponsor.)

Take a look, especially if you are not updated with Astah’s new features. You can learn about Astah and its the latest key features and abilities quick.

CodeMash will be held almost in a month which will have over 100 sessions & keynotes about methodologies, technology trends and languages spread across various interests in the 3 days! We are SO excited to be there!

If you are already going, drop us a line or leave a comment to let us know, and we’ll see you there!

Cheers,
SJ

InfoQ interview at Agile2011

At Agile2011, Kuroiwa-san, Kiro Harada, and I were interviewed by Shane Hastie at InfoQ, and it has been published recently as “Examining the Roots of Agile”.

Kuoiwa-san, has been my TSP sensei for long time.

The highlight to me was that he said that in software development world we were still missing the whole view. In this talk, the division of laber, silos of teams are mentioned,  but not only those. After this talk, he talked with Mary about the need of the big picture of software design in paper so everybody involved can see and walk through.

And I also liked my analogy. “Lean is like tomato juice. Extracted from tomato and made portable, while  TPS is the tomato itself with roots in the ground. It needs cultural and social soil, and without it, it cannot live long.”

Here are two links about Kuroiwa-san I wrote about.

•  I once wrote a blog etnry about TPS and him titled – “Think for yourself in your context” is the heart of Lean.
  Yes, it actually is too, in Agile.
• I invited him as a keynote speaker at AgileJapan2010 and did a panel discussion with Mary Poppendieck. It was fun he talked about Agile and Mary talked about TPS! Here’s a report.

Thanks Shane for the nice interview !

-Kenji