Cloning old tickets with an amended approval step not working

[Jeremy Jones]

I have a team that clones their tickets quite often and is something I have encouraged. I have recently made a change to the approval process however I notice that any new tickets the approval step works as intended but for any cloned tickets, it just gets stuck in the approval step. 

Ive included screenshots of the new step in the workflow

And the results when otherwise identical tickets are sent to the approval step. A new ticket works fine and the cloned ticket is stuck. Obviously the custom field being used is populated correctly given it works for new tickets.

Is there a setting I am missing? How can this be rectified as it is really not feasible to not utilise the "clone" function.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Hi @Jeremy Jones 

It looks like there's no-one added to Change and Deployment Approvers.

That would appear to be a user picker field or a group field.

How is that populated when you create a new work item?  And is it populated when you clone a work item?

[Stephen_Lugton]

Following on from that, did you add the Change and Deployment Approvers field when you created the approvals process?  If so, does it have a value on the work items being cloned?

It's possible that your work item creation process requests that field be filled or sets it automatically, on any work items created before you added that field it will be empty, so when you clone them they will be cloned without that field filled in.

[Jeremy Jones]

This might be a possibilty @Stephen_Lugton 

I will check this out - thank you for the idea

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jeremy Jones 

I see that your post has JSM tags on it. Can you confirm that this concerns a Jira Service Management project?

Is it a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project?

What is the status of the issue when it is cloned?

What is the change that you made to the approval process?

[Jeremy Jones]

Thanks for your reply @Trudy Claspill 

Our company is still switching from Jira to JSM

This particular project is a Jira Software project, however these tickets and workflows (including the approval step) are used across all projects in the company. 

The status of the cloned issues is the same as the new tickets - it sits correctly in PENDING APPROVAL.

Previously the transition out of PENDING APPROVAL status was restricted to a Group of approvers 

[Trudy Claspill]

Is Pending Approval the initial status of an issue using this workflow?

Is the issue being cloned while in that status?

[Jeremy Jones]

Neither

The only change between old and new workflows was the approval step 

Tickets start in TO DO status and are then progressed to PENDING APPROVAL.

They are be cloned post-closure so completely different status. Doing some testing, it doesnt seem to matter what status they are cloned in, if cloned at all they get stuck.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello Jeremy,

Just to make sure I'm understanding your scenario:

The approval step already existing and was working for cloned issues.
You then changed the configuration of the approval step so that the source was no longer a groups and instead became a Jira issue field.
Then the approval step stopped working for issues created by cloning existing issues.

Is that correct?

If so, then I concur with @Stephen_Lugton . You need to confirm that the field is populated in the source issue.