It would be convenient to be able to configure Robot Framework to have custom statuses in addition to the current PASS and FAIL and the forthcoming SKIP (#3622). Currently tests can have tags to differentiate them, but explicit statuses would make the distinction more clear.

This functionality could be implemented so that new statuses are defined based on old statuses and tags. The specification could be given from the command like with a command line option like --addstatus with an argument in format such as NEWSTATUS:OLDSTATUS:TAGPATTERN:COLOR. In this spec NEWSTATUS would be the name of the new status to add, OLDSTATUS would be the old status to base this status on, TAGPATTERN would be the tag or tag pattern (e.g. tag, tag:* or tag1ORtag2) matching test must have, and COLOR would be the color associated with the status (possibly optional). Example:

--addstatus KNOWN_ISSUE:FAIL:bug-id-*:purple

One use case for this feature would be separating tests skipped explicitly during execution and tests skipped by the forthcoming --skiponfailure feature. This would be convenient for those who oppose removing the criticality concept (#3624):

--addstatus NON-CRITICAL:SKIP:non-critical:pink --skiponfailure non-critical