Help needed with a workflow and setting up approvals

[Carl Wardle]

Having reviewed and tried the detail from multiple "help" items and gone around in circles, can someone please help me with the following? 

I have setup a workflow and attached it to an issue (that is all good and works). It is a bare bones thing that needs fleshing out as below:

I now need to allocate people to approval groups, e.g. Engineers to eng review group and Product owner to backlog review group. How do I do this? (I need 2 groups as we have different approvers for different stages)

Once I have allocated people to the approval groups, I will then add them to the workflow at the relevant point. I assume this is via "Add approval > Configure" on the workflow and choosing the approval group name?

One help page stated about adding approval buttons but did not link to how to do it. Do I need to do this having done the above or will the system do it for me via emails etc when a workflow reaches that point?

Thank you in advance for your help.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hi @Carl Wardle and welcome to the community!

let's see if we can find some clarity in the madness that is Atlassian documentation sometimes :)

You are right that you will add an approval step to the workflow (by going to configure approval on the workflow status). There you can choose what field the approval step needs to read the approval from (this can be a group or a user (list))

At this panel you also configure what needs to happen if an approval is either given or rejected (which transition to follow). And you can define how many approvals are required (a single person, or all users/x amount of users)

Once your process reaches that status the process will be stuck and those groups/users will be presented with buttons to approve/decline either on the portal or directly in Jira (agent view).

The approvers will receive an email about it with a portal link if you enable this in the customer notifications and they can also approve by email but we'll cross that bridge if you need it.

If you need multiple approvers you can either add multiple groups on a single step OR if this needs to be sequential you'll have to set up multiple statusses where one approval will lead to another.

Here is the article that always seems the clearest to me

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

Does that make sense? Any specific part that's not clear? Feel free to let us know what part is confusing or not yet clear and we'll happily dive in deeper.

[Carl Wardle]

Hi Dirk

Thank you for that detail. It makes sense for what I need to do once I have an approver group setup.

What I cannot fathom is the "Get approvers from field > Approver groups". 

How do I edit who is in an approver group / field and can I add more groups to break it out into specialisations?

Also, "Include approvers from service". The only option I get is as shown and I do not know what this does. 

Thanks again.

[Carl Wardle]

@Dirk Ronsmans Any idea on the adding people to approver groups and creating multiple groups?

Thank you

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hi @Carl Wardle ,

Well first the "from services is is something new they added with JSM with the Service Registry and the integration with Opsgenie. so if you don't use that yet you don't need to worry about it.

Your question about the approver groups field, that's the default "user group picker field" that is there. You should be able to select any user group picker field that is available.

It will read the content of that field  on the issue and use that group then as the approver. 

To populate the field (which I guess you are not trying to find) you have multiple options. you can set it to a default value, you can add it to the screen and have someone fill the field manually or use an automation to set the value.

The groups themselves are just defined under your regular user management (users and groups)