Astah GSN Beta Released!

We are pleased to announce that Astah GSN Beta version was released today.

GSN (Goal Structuring Notation) is a graphical notation developed at the University of York for specifying safety cases for safety critical systems. Several standards such as ISO26262 (Automotive E/E systems) and IEC62278 (Railway) mandate the use of safety cases and GSN supports their argumentation structures and its relation to evidences in a comprehensible yet compelling form.

Astah GSN is a simple and intuitive tool to model this GSN.
For about 5 months since its alpha release, we received some feedback and kept changing its abilities and usabilities to make it a better fit to our users. (Many thanks to Kobayashi-san and all the other users who took time to write us the detailed feedback.)

Here are the main changes made in this beta version:

(1) Ability to set “undeveloped” for multiple models at once
Now you can set “Undeveloped” to multiple models once from the Pop-up menu.

(2) Ability to add a Note and Note Anchor
Now you can enter free text and attach it to the target models.

(3) Moved the focus to “statement” when a model is created for efficiency
At a time a new model is created, the focus used to be on its ID, but we moved it to the “statement” to let you enter the most important information as soon as a model is created.

(4) Module will no longer have its diagram as a hyperlink
Module will no longer have its diagram as a hyperlink. In previous version, hyperlink icon was added to the Module when it was created in a diagram, but it wasn’t when it was added in the Structure view (see bottom figure), so this change was to make it all consistent. Now double-clicking the Module directly in the diagram will open its diagram.