There have been several requests to be able to mark tests skipped: #812, #837, #964, #1732, #2064. Some of them use different term than skip (e.g. warn or blacklist) but the basic idea is similar.

So far all such requests have been rejected because Robot Framework already has a concept of non-critical tests and non-critical failures with a clear error message can be used to emulate skipping. I'm not inherently against skipping, though, and see that explicit SKIP status would often be more clear than non-critical FAIL. Many other test tool also has such status and being compatible with them would be nice.

I'm not planning to implement this functionality in the foreseeable future, but I wanted to open an issue about it to have a place where to discuss it. The main problem with implementation is that it would be quite a big task. The first step would be designing how the functionality actually should work. At least these things should be taken into account:

1. How to mark a test skipped. Possibilities include:
   • Based on tags from the command line.
   • Using a BuiltIn keyowrd.
   • Using a custom exception in a test library.
2. How skipped tests affect statistics?
3. How skipped tests affect overall execution result? What should the report background be if there are passed and skipped tests in a suite? What if there are only skipped?

I encourage people interested about the skip status to comment here or possibly start a discussion on the robotframework-users mailing list or on the new Slack community. If we can agree with the overall design, someone can then start actually implementing the functionality.