How Chromatic Streamlined Open-Source Development with Asana and GitHub

The team at Chromatic maintains Storybook, an open-source tool that streamlines the development, testing, and documentation of UI components.

Chromatic is a platform that allows anyone to preview elements built with Storybook by publishing them to a secure cloud. Team engineering manager, Amanda Martinez, needed to optimize work across multiple GitHub repositories and Asana projects.

Initial challenge: Preparing a scope of work that could manage hundreds of collaborators

The open-source nature of Storybook means Amanda had to create processes that could withstand contributions from hundreds — if not thousands — of collaborators. She was one person trying to anticipate and oversee the work of countless more.

“When I first came in, the team was using boards in GitHub to try and manage projects, and then duplicating that effort in Asana. We all knew there had to be a better way.”

Amanda Martinez, Engineering Manager, Chromatic

Solution: Creating an automated workflow capable to handle scaling demand

While most engineers could happily work without leaving GitHub, Amanda needed to hop back and forth between the two tools to see out how things were progressing.

It took more time than she expected to check in with the team in GitHub and report back to the team in Asana.

Amanda turned to Unito to build flows between Chromatic’s Asana projects and GitHub milestones. GitHub issues were then organized under milestones, which reflect the feature-driven project work Chromatic is doing.

Results: $2,300 and 28 hours saved in time otherwise spent on manual upkeep

Thanks to Unito’s robust, two-way integrations, each GitHub issue is paired up with an Asana task, meaning progress updates are automatically synced between tools.

Without Unito, centralizing updates from these two repositories meant hopping back and forth between them. Now the team can manage projects for both platforms from the same place in Asana.

However, just because the team at Chromatic is responsible for maintaining Storybook doesn’t mean they want everything they do to be open-source.

There’s some information they don’t want external collaborators — or competitors — to see. With Unito’s rules, Amanda was able to choose what kind of information she wanted synced.

Watch this Asana GitHub workflow in action

““I can live in Asana and find what I need on the GitHub side without actually having to go in there. I set rules to only sync what I need from specific milestones with specific tags set in Asana to make sure only certain tasks appear in GitHub.”

Amanda Martinez, Engineering Manager, Chromatic

About Chromatic

The team at Chromatic maintains Storybook, an open-source tool that streamlines the development, testing, and documentation of UI components and the Chromatic platform, which previews these components.