JSM - Capture Partial approval

Ricardo.Gomes

Hello community!

We have an approval process  already established in JSM that requires two internal approvers for the issue to move to the next step in the workflow. However, it is a new requirement to allow the request to be executed with a single approval while waiting for that second one (which is still required) by adding a comment to the ticket after the first approval.

The problem is that I don't think Jira will let me capture the event of a single approval when multiple approvals are required but only when the request is fully approved. 

On the other hand, I didn't want to change the current approval process to have two approval steps (one for each of the two approvers) - mainly because the two approvers should receive the approval request simultaneously and be able to approve in any order with both approvals required for the request to be considered approved.

Any suggestions on how to solve this?

Ricardo.Gomes

In contacting Atlassian support, they had an interesting idea using Automation, which I believe to be a good approach, so I'll copy and paste the suggestion here for anyone going through the same questions I had - 

From my support ticket with Atlassian (credits to Mateus Gauto):

This is somewhat possible using automation for Jira. The only issue would be that we do not have any automation trigger that could monitor the status of the approval process, so we'd have to use a "scheduled" trigger, which could have some drawbacks I'll explain below.

For the automation itself, we can use an If/else block that will check whether the issue has been approved by one of the approvers on the list (but not the other) and comment on the ticket when this scenario is true. To build this, we'll use some smart values to check the current state of the approval process:

Condition 1

{{issue.customfield_10500.approvers.get(0).approverDecision.get(0)}} 

This will return "approved" when it has been approved by the first approver on the list. Otherwise, it will return "pending".

Condition 2

{{issue.customfield_10500.approvers.get(0).approverDecision.get(1)}}

This will return "approved" when it has been approved by the second approver on the list. Otherwise, it will return "pending".

So we'll use a scheduled automation that will periodically check all tickets that are pending approvals, and if the ticket has one of the conditions being equal to "approved" while the other is "pending", it means it was approved by the first user, so a comment is posted on the ticket.

The only drawback to this would be the interval in which the automation checks the list of tickets. For example, if the automation checks the list of tickets every 5 minutes, and both approvals happen in this 5 minutes window, it won't be triggered since both conditions will be "approved" by the time it runs.