Bypassing the "everyone needs to approve" rule in Jira's native Approval feature.

Douglas Grimes

Team Managed - Business Space

Hello, I am trying to bypass the "everyone needs to approve" rule with the Jira's native "Approval" feature through automation. The current method is a manually removing the "pending" users once the 2 of the 5 assigned users approve which triggers the approval to be approved and ticket follows into the next status.

Is this possible with automation?

Matthew Sinclair

Automation isn't something you want to leverage to solve this.

The best solution is to adjust the workflow to say "2 Members required to pass" (or something to that effect). I know for a fact JSM does this easily - should be able to do the same in Jira.

Generally speaking (and I'm making a very "light" assumption here as this is Jira - not JSM/CSM) - Approval systems are nearly entirely run from the Workflow itself.

When your dealing with Approvals you have to decide on whether you use "Approvers" - Users (User Picker) - which can be preloaded by automation or the layout (JSM Thing only maybe?).

Or Approver Groups - which is maintained by the Org Admin. (Not Atlassian Teams - unless the team is bound to a Group).

Not sure you can use both in tandem - maybe? You can have multiple groups however - that I do know.

I'd recommend sticking with either/or - it gets confusing as it is. In your case? I highly suggest a group - this will make it less painful.

Then you define the approval rules/conditions in the Workflow - that being only 1 to many/all required before it passes or as many as you want or all (Yuck!).

In your case your going to say "2" members are enough.

Whether the "Reporter" of a ticket can be allowed to approve or not - etc.

Once those conditions are set - you really cannot bypass them with automation. Automation is more of a "preload" or "post" response to Approvals - other than "Nagging" users to respond during the process.

Bottom line - you shouldn't use Automation to solve this - you need to check your Workflow Configuration for the Approval system itself - or restructure the approach of how you do Approvals.

Using Automation to work around this will likely cost you too many steps - and that's not a good idea with the new Usage Rules coming into effect in December.
So while not impossible - I'd urge you to check your Workflow and consider updating the approval steps themselves. If you can't - then I'll need to more details - like is it a list of users? a group? Etc. I might be able to engineer a work around - but the problem here is Automation isn't designed to see the status of an approval during the process - it responds to it. You may have to do some really advanced smart value tracking here. (In other words this is the hardest approach route)

This is JSM's documentation as I only found "references" to it in Jira - the system is nearly identical in workflow editor terms - so keep that in mind and don't get stuck on JSM being the subject line.

Reference: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/add-an-approval-to-a-workflow/

You need to identify the transitions and check the configuration - here you will likely find the best solution overall. Usually noted with a green check mark/red X transition lines. Caution - Inactive Workflows won't let you modify/add/configure approvals (I hate this).

Back up your configuration - maybe duplicate and swap in/swap out.

Note: Weirdly enough documentation says company manged works - could have swore the exam said Team Managed only? Oh - its Jira Premium only - Ill have to remember that. So Confusing. (ACP-120/620 exams)