Configuring Issue Approvals

To reach the Issue Approvals page, log-in as an administrator and click on JIRA ADMINISTRATION > Manage apps in the banner. Then, locate the OSLC Connect section and click on Issue Approvals.

Configuring Issue Approvals may be an optional step whether or not it is planned to create Collaboration Links with Requirements applications that use Change Sets (like IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next). These applications can be configured to prevent delivering a Change Set, over another configuration, if they are linked to a non-approved work item (or in the case of Jira, to a non-approved issue). If this is a scenario you are planning to have, or have already, then you must tell OSLC Connect for Jira when to consider an issue as approved, this due to Jira not having a built-in field for that.

This configuration is not done at project level but at Issue Type Scheme level. This means once configured for a given Issue Type Scheme, it will apply for all issues of all projects sharing that scheme.

Configuration is called Issue Approval Strategy and it comes in three flavors:

None
No issue is considered approved, ever.
This is the default configuration for all schemes.
Basic
Done issues with selected Resolutions are considered approved.
Done issues having a given resolution(s) are considered approved.
Advanced
Approved issues are determined by a JQL expression.
All scheme issues matching a JQL expression are considered approved.

Once you have decided which strategy fits better your needs, you can set it using next steps:

  1. Select the scheme for which you want to define/change an approval strategy in the Scheme combo.
  2. Select one of the strategies mentioned above. In the case of the Basic strategy, make sure to select at least one Resolution before continuing or you wont be able to save the change [1]. In the case of the Advanced mode, make sure to introduce a valid expression in the JQL Expression [2], [3].
  3. Click on the Save button located at the top right corner of the page.

That's it, once the strategy is saved, all issues belonging to a project using the selected scheme will start being reported as approved (or not) depending on the selected strategy. Please note it was stated: "all issues belonging to a project using the selected scheme". This means that for the Advanced mode you don't need to specify a clause containing a project term (and actually is forbidden), because introduced expression is already internally bound to the projects using the selected scheme [4], [5]. If this term is used, a warning message will indicate that it is not allowed.

Finally, it is worth to mention that for the Advanced mode, and when you had introduced a valid JQL expression, it is possible to navigate to the issue search page to visualize the scheme issues that are considered approved under the given expression... or what is more valuable, you can try an issue to see if it is considered approved or not by typing it in an input field. You can access these features by clicking in the corresponding link below the expression field. Note: if you happen to type/select an issue that doesn't belong to a project using the scheme, the approval status resolution will still be performed, but a warning message will notify you that such issue is out of the scope of the selected scheme.

[1] By default, all Resolutions will be automatically selected for you, make sure to uncheck those non applicable. [2] An error message will indicate any problem with a wrong typed expression and you will be able to jump to the issues search page to complete/validate it. [3] You can always start creating the expression in the issues search page so when satisfied, you can copy and paste it in the strategy field expression. [4] For similar reason, other forbidden terms are issue and issuekey. [5] The "projects in the scheme" bound is also true for the Basic strategy.