What is parity?
To achieve parity is to align ways of working between design and development. Striving for one common language to speak, an agreed process to collaborate and ultimately that what is designed and developed is actually what is shipped.
Communication
Collaboration is key ingredient for a efficient team. And the best way to have a great collaboration is being able to communicate efficiently.
One area of frequent misunderstanding between designers and developers come often down to how things are called. Components, properties, pattern, interactions can have many different name depending of the people or company you work with. It doesn't help that big companies like Apple and Google have so many different names for the same exact component and patterns.
HIG: Grabber
Material: Drag handle
And while platform specific developers might find these terms very familiar, it create friction when interfacing with designers who are used to speak in design term or design tool…
Naming
A considerate amount of time of my week is usually spent in meetings with devs aligning and deciding how to names things. Agreed naming is the foundation of a better communication.
Do your research internally and externally of your company. Ultimately choose what's best for you and your teams.
Structure
Figma component should reflect code component not only on a design level but also on a property, behaviour and structure level.
Make sure your design component is named as close as possible to the component developers gonna use. This ensure a smooth handoff and a better developer experience when translating design to code.
The variant in your design should also be reflect 1:1 on the code. Aligning on naming those property consistently between platform make sure everybody speak the same language.
Truncation, responsiveness and translation are just a few of the many behaviour that can affect your design. If not explicitly communicated to the developers that might be chances that wont make it live.
Processes
Aligning way of working and processes between design and development not only benefits both side but ensure consistency in expectation and outcome. Working at a design system, a branching approach in both Figma and Github allowed us never to expose unfinished work and always isolate changes. Consistency naming branches with the same ticket number and name was also easier to reference for external teams that needed to updated on the work in progress.