Last week, my clever colleague Donal McCarthy wrote about adding a custom action to SharePoint 2010 using SharePoint Designer to create workflow and make that workflow accessible from a custom entry in an item's hover menu. In case that wasn't as inspirational to you as a ream of construction paper and an 64 box of crayons would be to a 5-year-old, today I'm sharing with you a similar design to the design similar to that which I created for a customer a few months ago that follows the same principal.

Somewhere out there is a QA team for a large software development project with an ever-expanding list of test cases. Should one of the test cases not pass, the team is to log a bug against it for the engineers to review and rectify. Once the code is recompiled, the associated business scenario is again added to the queue for the QA team to retest.

The requirement was to reduce data duplication and number of clicks for this activity.

First, two custom lists were created within a project site, one to hold the test cases and one for the bugs.

Test Cases 1

Second, a custom workflow was associated with the Test Cases list in SharePoint designer to automate as much as possible the creation of a bug from a testing scenario.

The workflow was set to only trigger manually and included an initiation form. This is the form the tester would use to log a bug and included only the fields in the Bug List that 1) couldn't be populated from the instigating Test Case and 2) were not to be later filled out by the engineer; e.g., "Able to replicate?"

Using the information inputted from both the form and associated test case, the workflow then creates a new item in the Bug Tracking list and sends out some alerts.

Third, I scoured Bing's image results for the perfect icon for my custom action. The one I found wasn't perfect, ladybugs are one of the nicer bugs until they infest your basement. I'm sure you can do better. Anyway, I uploaded the image to a site collection picture library I created to hold the all site image files and copied the shortcut.

Fourth, I opened the Test Cases list in Designer and clicked on Custom Action > View Ribbon in the ribbon.

I labeled it something really obvious like "Log a Bug Against This Test Case" and selected the Initiate Workflow radio button, selecting the 'Create Bug from Item' workflow I created in step 2. For the button image I pasted in the link to the ladybug icon I collected in step 3.

Fifth, I saved my changes. (Important!)

Sixth¸ I opened the Test Cases list in the site and selected the checkbox next to one of the items. And, viola, a ladybug scurried onto my screen seemingly from nowhere!

Seventh¸ and most important, I tested my new bug feature until SharePoint was full of bugs. Because if it didn't work, there'd be nowhere to log it!