Insight
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. Chromatic’s engineering manager, Amanda Martinez, needed to optimize work across multiple GitHub repositories and Asana projects. The open-source nature of Storybook means she has to create processes that can withstand contributions from hundreds — if not thousands — of collaborators.
“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
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
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.
““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.
