Is there a way to “lock down” approvers?

[Jason Cassier]

I understand that you can add a default set of approvers, but can you make it where users cannot just add anyone as an approver?  My goal is to prevent a user from putting themselves or an unauthorized approver from easily bypassing the approval workflow.

[Cody Stevens]

Hey @Jason Cassier

Unfortunately out of the box, I do not believe there is a way to do this. There are definitely marketplace add ons that can help you achieve this though. I am going to show you two but I am sure there are tons more!

ScriptRunner:

If anyone has Groovy knowledge on your team, this is definitely an add on you'll want to utilize. It allows you to do powerful scripting and many other things that really help fine tune your instance.

I dont have a ton of ScriptRunner experience so I cant say how you can make this but you could use this add on to make a validator script on the create transition in the workflow. This script would need to check who the reporter/current user is and who is in the "Sys Admin Approvers field" to make sure they do not match. If they did, it would fail and the ticket would error out.

Automation For Jira:

AFJ is another addon I strongly suggest everyone to use. You don't need any coding experience for this app and it allows you to add advanced automation to your projects.

In this scenario I made an automation for you so you can see what it would look like. Unfortunately, the trigger would be the issue being created but once it is, the automation would run. Once it runs it would compare two values, "Sys Admin Approvers" and the reporter field. It will be checking to see if they contain or equal eachother (depends on if the approver field is a multi user picker). If they do, the automation will clear the approver field and add a comment telling the reporter that they cannot add themselves to the approver list.

AFJ also has a free version but it does limit how many automations can run a month (300)

I hope this helps you figure out your problem. I would look on the marketplace for other workflow add ons that can help with this as well. There are tons of add ons out there!