# Weekly code health brief for engineering leadership

> Every Monday at 8am, your leads get a plain English read on code quality across every project, plus a spreadsheet that tracks the trend over time.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: SonarCloud, Google Sheets, Gmail
- Categories: Engineering, Operations
- Published: 2026-08-09

## What it does

- Reads every project in your SonarCloud organization each Monday morning and pulls the numbers that matter: test coverage, duplicated code, technical debt, and the reliability, security and maintainability ratings.
- Compares this week against last week and leads with what actually changed, naming the three projects that slipped the most.
- Flags any project whose test coverage dropped by more than two points, and any project that is now failing its quality gate.
- Logs one row per project per week to a spreadsheet so a trend builds over months, then emails the written brief to your engineering leads.

## What you'll need

- A SonarCloud account covering the projects you want in the brief
- A Google account for Gmail and Google Sheets
- A spreadsheet to hold the weekly tracking rows
- The email addresses of the engineering leads who should receive the brief

## Prompt

Every Monday at 8am, write a code health brief for our engineering leadership so nobody has to open a SonarCloud dashboard to know how we are doing.

Start with the SonarCloud "Projects — Search" operation to enumerate every project in our organization. Page through the results so the brief covers all of them, not just the first page.

For each project, use "Measures — Component" to read the current coverage, duplicated lines density, technical debt (the sqale_index metric), and the reliability, security and maintainability ratings. Then use "Quality Gates — Project Status" to get the current pass or fail state.

Use "Measures — Search History" to pull those same metrics from roughly one week ago for each project, and compare. This comparison is the whole point of the brief: lead with what actually moved rather than a wall of raw numbers.

In the narrative, call out the three projects that regressed the most and explicitly flag any project whose coverage fell by more than two percentage points. Also name anything that newly failed its quality gate, and give credit where a project genuinely improved.

If a project has no fresh analysis in the past week, or is missing one of the metrics, leave it out of the comparison rather than reporting a false regression, and note at the end of the brief which projects had no new data.

Append one row per project per week to a tracking spreadsheet using the Google Sheets "Append Values" operation so a trend line builds over time. Each row should carry the week's date, the project name, coverage, duplicated lines density, technical debt, the three ratings, and the quality gate state.

Then send the narrative brief to the engineering leads with the Gmail "Send a Message" operation. Keep the prose skimmable for a VP who does not read code: short paragraphs, plain language, no metric jargon, and a one line verdict at the top saying whether code health improved or declined overall this week. Let the spreadsheet carry the per project detail, and link to it from the email.

## How to customize

- Change the timing: Monday at 8am is the default, but any day and hour works.
- Change who gets it: send to a single VP, a leads alias, or a wider engineering list.
- Change the thresholds: the two point coverage drop and the top three regressions are both easy to adjust.
- Narrow the scope to a subset of projects if you only care about what is running in production.

## Example output

Code health, week of 9 June

Overall: slightly down. Two projects slipped, one recovered, and the rest held steady.

What moved most:
1. checkout-service. Coverage fell from 71% to 64% and it is now failing its quality gate. This is the one to ask about.
2. billing-api. Technical debt grew by about 4 days of work, mostly new maintainability issues from last week's refactor.
3. notifications-worker. Duplicated code rose from 3.1% to 5.8%.

Coverage alert: checkout-service dropped 7 points, well past the 2 point threshold.

Good news: internal-admin cleared its quality gate for the first time in a month.

Full per project numbers are in the tracking sheet.

## FAQ

### Do I need to understand the SonarCloud dashboard to read this?

No, and that is the point. The email is written in plain language for someone who does not read code. The detailed numbers live in the spreadsheet for anyone who wants to dig in.

### What is technical debt in this report?

It is your code quality tool's estimate of how much engineering time it would take to fix the known issues in a project. Tracking it week over week shows whether that backlog is growing or shrinking.

### Will it still email us on a quiet week?

Yes, you still get the Monday brief, but it will say plainly that little changed rather than padding it out with numbers. You can also adjust it to stay quiet when nothing meaningful moved.

### Does this work if we only have a handful of projects?

Yes. The brief covers however many projects exist in your organization, whether that is three or three hundred.

### Can the brief go somewhere other than email?

Yes. The brief is just written text, so it can be pointed at a team chat channel instead if that is where your leads actually read things.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/weekly-code-health-brief-for-engineering-leadership