Approvals are often skipped in fast-moving workflows, but that can lead to compliance risks, audit failures, and messy rework. Read through our free guide and cheat sheet, Verify Approval in a Jira Workflow, that shows Jira admins how to enforce required approvals using Jira Misc Workflow Extensions (JMWE), with step-by-step instructions and optional logic for exceptions.
What you’ll learn
- How to prevent Jira work items from skipping the “Approval” status
- How to use JMWE’s Previous Status Validator, no scripting required
- How to handle exceptions using a custom “Risk” field
- Why approval enforcement matters for compliance and clarity
- Where to apply these validators across “In Progress” and “Closed” transitions
Make your Jira workflows smarter and safer
Flexible workflows are great… until someone skips the “Approval” step and starts work anyway. With JMWE, you can enforce process guardrails without disrupting your teams.
This guide walks you through:
- Adding validators to transitions in diagram or text mode
- Writing custom error messages to coach users in real time
- Testing your setup to ensure validation triggers as expected
- Conditionally skipping approval for low-risk work items using Groovy logic
For admins, designers, and compliance teams
This cheat sheet is designed for:
- Jira administrators setting up multi-team workflows who want to prevent skipped approval steps and keep transitions compliant across projects.
- Workflow architects responsible for process design who need practical examples for adding validators, writing error messages, and managing conditional logic.
- Compliance stakeholders who need auditable checkpoints to ensure approvals are always captured before work moves forward or work items are closed.
- Teams using Jira Cloud, Server, or Data Center with JMWE that want to streamline approval enforcement without heavy scripting or manual oversight.
Download the free JMWE workflow enforcement guide
Want to stop work items from jumping ahead in your workflows?
Get the validator setup that enforces approval and makes your Jira instance more audit-ready. Download the guide and make your workflows smarter.
Built by experts — ready to use
Written by Rachel Wright, certified Jira administrator and author of the Jira Strategy Admin Workbook, this quick guide turns workflow theory into action. You’ll get real screenshots, examples, and pre-tested steps you can follow right away.
To ensure Appfire is providing and delivering the most up-to-date and best information to our users that depend on us, this article has also been expertly reviewed by Dan Tombs.
Dan Tombs is a Solution Architect at Appfire with hands-on experience across the Atlassian ecosystem since 2016. He’s worked with end customers, solution partners, and now helps teams thrive by shaping tools and processes around how they actually work and not the other way around. Dan champions automation as a path to scaling productivity, reducing context switching, and unlocking what teams do best.