There is no problem at all using Jupyter with existing or new Python .py modules. With Jupyter running, simply fire up Spyder (or any editor of your choice) to build / modify your module class definitions in a .py file, and then just import the modules as needed into Jupyter.
One thing that makes this really seamless is using the autoreload magic extension. You can see documentation for autoreload here:
http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config/extensions/autoreload.html
Here is the code to automatically reload the module any time it has been modified:
# autoreload sets up auto reloading of modified .py modules
import autoreload
%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2
Note that I tried the code mentioned in a prior reply to simulate loading .ipynb files as modules, and got it to work, but it chokes when you make changes to the .ipynb file. It looks like you need to restart the Jupyter development environment in order to reload the .ipynb 'module', which was not acceptable to me since I am making lots of changes to my code.