How to setup multiple (and dynamic) approvers to Epics and/or User Stories in Jira

[Shawna Morris]

I'm helping my organization transition from Charter and Scope documents to Jira. We are a very controlled environment (which I'm working on) and the PMO would like to be able to have our business stakeholders approve the work items before development can begin. 

This is the ask... 

1. Business Analysts create Epics and Stories

2. Once reviewed with the Project Team, approval is sent out to a list of approvers (which changes with each project) 

3. Approvers must either 1) approve the Epic and have that approval cascade down to the associated Stories; or 2) approve each work item (Epic and Story) and have this approval captured in the work item (approver and approveDate) 

4. Once all approvals have been received, then development can begin. 

This is not the way that I would want this process to work but in an effort to get my business stakeholders and PMO on board with using Jira, I have to make some concessions. 

I've also thought about exporting the issue list for a project in to Confluence and creating some kind of approval flow around that, but, it doesn't live on within the issue itself. 

Any help would be incredibly appreciated! 

[Joe Pitt]

I don't think you'll be able to do this out of the box.

#2: is it only the users that change, but they are still in the same project role or are the roles different? If the roles are the same you can handle that with transitions for approval from each role and a custom select list field for each role with Yes or No options. Have the transition go back to the original status.

#3: You'll have to go with approving each work item. 

#4: This is where you'll have problems. There isn't a way to look at all the epics and stories to see if they are all approved 

I'm not aware of any plugin that will fill the gap

[Shawna Morris]

I was afraid of that answer. Approvers will more than likely be across multiple Jira Groups though I could advocate for a single group. 

I think the best route to go at this point is create some export of all the epics in a project and they're related stories and have this filter show up in Confluence and then wrap an approval process around that page. 

[Joe Pitt]

I suggest you get rid of groups and go with project roles. It allows more granularity in workflow conditions and the project lead can add/delete users from the roles. 

[Francesco Tesoriere]

Hello there,

We’re currently working on implementing some features into our app (Herzum Approval) that will allow you to manage the approval flow like you need.

Until that time we may have a solution:

• for your first case into this page
• for your second case into this one

In both cases we implemented it using our app and another one (Jira Workflow Toolbox).