Our design system devs asked us designers for a better way to compare changes within our component specs between updates. We stage our components as instances in a separate spec file from the library file the components are published from. Each component and variant is contained within an individual section acting as a wrapper. The wrapper is where we enable a “ready for dev” tag to capture a version history. Using this method we’ve run into a few obstacles:
- Sections don’t capture granular changes, we’ve had to switch from wrapping our component instances in sections to frames for a version history to be recorded within the compare/diff window.
- Ready for dev version history can only be viewed by first entering dev mode, then entering focus view on the versioned frame (it doesn’t show if you enter focus view from design mode). `Compare changes` within the standard dev mode view does not show this information and instead compares against the original component or shows version history as it pertains to the file’s version history (not the frame’s).
- Updates to instances don’t trigger changes. One of the biggest things we want to track is when variables & styles are updated/changed on an instance of a component within a recorded frame. For example, we recently updated the font style of our badge component which visually looks very different. No change was logged under the focus view version history list. To trigger a version history checkpoint to be logged, I have to toggle the ready for dev tag from ready to complete, update the instance, then reopen the tag as incomplete. We’ve had to teach all of our devs how to turn off status updates in Dev mode so they’re not on blast for each status change. A simple solve for this is to allow manual version history checkpoints to be logged for frames with ready for dev enabled, similar to a file’s version history.
- There is no way to batch resolve yellow ready for dev tags. On our button spec file, we have so many component instances we’re tracking in a single spec, all things we want individual version histories to be recorded for. Sometimes I’ll update a branch from main and half of those tags will turn yellow for an imperceivable change. When that happens I just tell devs to ignore it rather than update each individual frame back to completed. Either having a way to batch update these, or allow us to dismiss/remove checkpoints from the version history would be a big time saver.
Thanks for the ready for dev feature, despite the above, it’s a feature we still see a lot of worth in for our workflows. Looking forwards to future updates!
-Laura