Jira processes for engineering and design team integration

[Aimee Roddick _Walter_]

I work at a small software company using Jira, with just 5 engineers, 1 architect, and 2 designers. Our engineers/architect have been using Jira for quite some time for engineering work, and I recently onboarded the design team into Jira for their design work, as well, as a lot of the design work integrates with engineering (engineering is dependent on the design completion). The design team is using Figma for designing. 

Before the design team started working in Jira, all conversations between engineering and design were through comments/tags to the designer on an existing engineering case or Slack messages to the design team. Now that we're on Jira, we have design cases for the design team and cases for the engineering team to do the work after the design. Although this is already much better, I know there's still room for improvement. 

Pain points:

• Design needed for engineering case
  • Engineer is creating a linked case and assigning to the designer, marking case as blocked by new design case
  • When the design case is done, the engineer is not getting a notification that design is completed and that engineering work can begin
  • Question: How have other folks handled this? Do you have automation in place for this?
• Design review/sign-off of engineering work
  • After engineering is completed and tested, the designer wants to review and sign-off of what is in the system compared to the design
  • Currently, this is still happening outside of Jira with messages OR the engineer is creating a linked design review/sign-off case
  • When the design review/sign-off is done, there's no notification back to engineering to complete their case, migrate build, etc. 
  • If there are issues with the design review, there's not a clear process of how the designer should communicate those back to engineering. 
  • Question: Has anyone been able to solve this problem? What do you do for this? 

I'm curious if anyone has implemented workflows or automation to handle this integration between design and engineering that's working well for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts! 

[John Funk]

Hi Aimee,

I highly suggest doing this as a single card/work item. Then update your workflow to have a Design step. Then all of your conversations can happen in the single work item and it moves through your workflow from Backlog to Design, to Design Reviews, to Ready for Development to Development, Testing, etc. Call the steps whatever you like and have as many or few steps as you like. But have at least one for Design and one for Engineering/Development.