Nancy Van Schooenderwoert at Lean-Agile Partners Inc. invited me to talk at Agile New England. She and I first met at Agile Development Conference 2003 and since then, we have been good friends and seeing each other at every annual Agile conference. But this time, it was a local community, and I’d loved to meet people there. I heard that Agile New England was established by a group of people including Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, and Nancy.
My talk was about “Exploring User Wish through Mindmapping”. This was my first opportunity to talk at New England, but the community was so nice and welcomed my talk. Here’s the slide of my talk.
After the talk, they took us for dinner and some of the attendees came along. Was such a wonderful evening connecting with passionate people at Agile New England community. Thank you very much for everyone who attended there and giving us the opportunity to be there. Hope to come back here again.
Dinner after my session at Agile NewEngland, from the left – Nancy, Satomi, David, Eddie, Marina, Kenji and Gloria
Astah in 5min 
White paper of the summary of this topic “Zen and the Art of User Requirements” is available from Astah’s website:
Click to access zen-and-the-art-of-user-requirements.pdf
HI Kenji – I thought I knew all about mindmapping and about gathering info for Agile stories – so it’s worth noting what I found new in your talk: It’s the speed and simplicity you showed in taking very small notes during the user interview, and then being able to reformat those notes from a mind map to user stories and use cases with almost no additional effort. You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into your “Astah” tool.
We all had a great time talking with you and Satomi afterwards. I hope we can host you again soon.
– Nancy V. , @vanschoo
I enjoyed your talk and chatting with you at dinner. I was intrigued by your tools’ ability to convert Mind Maps into User Stories. I look forward to learning more about this technique.
David Grabel
David,
It was a nice dinner and talking with you, thank you !
Hope we can see each other in Japan, next time.
-Kenji
Hi Kenji,
I’ve been using Mind Maps for many years to build project plans and create class outlines. It was great to learn your approach to developing user stores using Mind Maps. Great presentation!
John Vins
John,
It is great to know that a mindmapping practitioner like you also liked my idea. I think software development can benefit more from this visualization technique. If you have any other usage ideas in software development, please share with us.
Here’s some of other examples I have.
– XP and Agile books list
http://p.astah.net/d/gc9psq4k
– Leanstartup Book review
http://p.astah.net/d/yesoetuh
– Design Patterns at a glance
http://p.astah.net/d/y9lo6d50
And other diagrams (including UML)
http://p.astah.net/a/y9ha57qv
-Kenji