change request approval skipped

[Les1]

Had a couple of change request tickets reported to me as having skipped through Approval workflow, state goes from New to Scheduled.

Investigating I found that in both cases the Approval task had resulted in "skipped" but dont know the cause. And in sub-prod I've been unable to reproduce the behavior using the same pertinent fields (assignment group and so forth). I even did a test in PROD and did not reproduce the behavior.

Typical factors of Assignment group missing, or Assignment group not having anyone in it were both ok in both tickets. In fact the user making the two tickets had made other similar tickets with no issue. 

We are using Approval policy definitions, which in our case is based on assignment groups and i verified the assignment group was covered in the policy definition.

Anything else i can investigate to get a 'why' for the approval tasks resulting in Skipped? 

thanks all

[Michael Fry1]

Does the group being used for approval have the approval_user role?

[Les1]

No it doesn't. actually it has no roles set on it. The users in the group all have backend access and can fully view/edit change records (ITIL)

However, this hasn't prohibited approvals from working previously, and even now as i've been unable to reproduce the issue even when using the same parameters as the offending tickets. 

Would lacking the approval_user role contribute to a sporadic logic handling by the workflow?

thanks

[Michael Fry1]

Something changed along the way in one of the patches or major upgrades where you had to have an approval_user role. We ran into the same issues you are describing and could reproduce the issue. When we added the role, no issue.

[Les1]

interesting. 

well i can certainly add the role, for this use case it shouldnt cause an issue and as you mention may help.

if it was a No Role user that does approvals, adding that role would mess us up due to it breaking the forced to Service Portal functionality for no role users - which i have ran into and at least several months ago there wasnt much of a resolve  for. 

thanks!