Process for UX/UI working with Jira

I have recently had a 1.5 year assignment with Ericsson. A big Swedish telecom company. I worked with them and helped them to visualize new digital solutions in there digitalization process.

I want to share my experience on how I solved and worked out the process to best work with the developers and to secure a good documentation and quality releases

Below we can see a process chart of how the Jira was set up. 

Epic: The epic is the requirement and the need from the business.

Task: Is the Jira ticket and where the work is done

In progress: Is when we are actually working on the task

Ready for review: This is when we had an internal review for the team. Including, Business analysts, Project owner, Developers, Data analysts and UX. Sometimes also users were involved.

Done: This is when the task is ready for release.

The issues that had been brought up in retrospective were a couple of things. First the developers were having a hard time locating the version of the image/file that I as a UXer had provided them with. I could be further in the future with the iteration with my task then the developers where. The second thing was that it was too late for me to give input to the developers in the internal review for errors in the design.

The first thing we did was to link a mock-up task and a developers task to the epic. Let’s call the mock-up task to finalize one or more screens LIO-007. Now we have setted up the Jira epic and Jira tasks.

The above Jira task we wanted to mirror in the UX file (in this case Adobe XD). That screen will be placed under a Work in progress (WIP) table or file. We don’t move the file from WIP until it is approved in the review. As a part of the In progress you alway should have a check-in with the developers. It is always good as a UX/UI designer to get help to decide if a solution is more or less easy to do. Just a small change in Design can be many hours of development that easily could have been saved with just a quick call to the developers.

When the screen is Ready for review it will be a sign-off meeting to approve the screen. This is done together with the business and the users. They need to be satisfied with the solution. Otherwise there is not any idea to start developing. Often you have done lo-fi sketches on the Epic leven and set-up of requirements. But it is always good to show the high-end files to the users because nearly every time they see things that they haven’t thought of. After the screen is approved it will be moved to an Approved flow or file.

Now and not before this the developers can start developing on the UI part of the screen. We have had the handshake and it has been approved by the business.

During the developers in progress or before the Ready for review part it is important to have a sign-off between the developers and the UX/UI to have it approved that everything looks like it should. This is because if it is done later it is hard to get the time to do the UI changes. That often isn’t system critical but is important for the user experience.

Important! If there are ad-hoc changes coming up during the developer user story, all changes to approved mock-ups should be changed after a handshake with the developers.

After the developer task has been completed the screen should be moved to Archived.

After we implemented this way of working we saved a lot of time and misunderstandings with each other. Who did what and when. And to insist in having clear sign offs and structure the files everybody was a lot happier.