Caravel for JIRA
Connect design guidelines to JIRA issues
Developers may pretty much be tech magicians, but if they are not enabled to grasp the design, there’s no perfect agile process that will save your product.
No matter how big or small agile teams are, there is one key factor that defines the ever so desired ‘delightful experience’: how well can we translate great UX into a final working product?
The gap between design and agile development has been there for a while. It’s very well addressed in some cases, but sometimes processes get in the way and cloud the visibility that both roles should have. We often see too many tools attempting to solve related pain points (e.g tools to ‘automatically transform design into code’, handy prototyping tools, powerful project management tools, and so on). But the important part that says “why — and for whom — are we doing this” is often forgotten. Design guidelines are there for a reason, and the Atlassian team itself has made a very good recommendation in their article, Agile by Design:
As the team engages in sprint planning and backlog grooming, involve the designers. Getting their input when making decisions about the product’s future direction will make getting there easier. — Dan Radigan, Senior Agile Evangelist @ Atlassian
Agile is not some sort of methodology that places design as a secondary activity. Quite the opposite, the better design can be integrated into sprints, the better results we should expect. Design and research are not only part of “Sprint zero”. They’re behind the whole product.
JIRA Add-on
That’s why we’re excited to announce that Caravel now integrates with JIRA — closing a gap many developers have when working with design guidelines. You can now connect design guidelines to JIRA issues. By having a direct gateway to Caravel, JIRA users may have instant access to:
- User research (e.g personas and user stories)
- Design workflows and principles
- UI screens and specs
- Color palettes
- Samples of style code (e.g CSS)
- And more…
How it works
Caravel for JIRA is very straightforward. Here’s how to get started:
- Join your team’s Caravel project first. If your team does not have a Caravel account yet, click here to get sign up for free.
- Install the free Caravel for JIRA add-on to your team’s JIRA account (or ask the account administrator to do so)
- Go to the Caravel page that features the guideline/content your team is working on. Click on “Share page” and copy the share link URL (or just ask a teammate to send you the link).
- Inside any JIRA issue, look for the Caravel section and paste the shared link.
- Done! You’ll get an up-to-date preview of the Caravel page, as well as a permanent link for direct access. Changes take effect automatically so you can always go back to check the latest updates in detail.
Why it works
There are several product teams that develop their own version of design guidelines. Those are usually written by in-house designers and hosted in some sort of company intranet. Here are a few examples of official product design guidelines.
It’s effective (and quite detailed), but it takes extra time and effort to produce. Moreover, there’s always a risk that those types of guidelines remain just another source for developers — a list of principles that are read once and forgotten afterward.
Caravel for JIRA makes developers’ lives easier by linking specific issues (e.g product improvements, features, bugs, etc) to a relevant Caravel page. Each page may contain an annotated design workflow, source files, color palettes, samples of code, personas, user stories, or whatever the design team may find useful to share. Possibilities are endless.
TIP: Here’s a quick guide to help you make the most out of Caravel as a developer.
On the designers’ end, producing product guidelines gets much simpler as Caravel provides a seamless platform to save, share, and consult guidelines among team and project members. So designers can better justify their decisions by linking research to actual deliverables.
