Weekly Engineering Report Guide

Koalr generates a weekly engineering digest that summarizes your team's delivery performance, highlights wins and watch items, and surfaces AI-generated insights. You can also build fully custom reports with the report builder and schedule them for automatic delivery.

This guide covers both the built-in weekly digest and the custom report builder.

Time to complete: 10--15 minutes.

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Prerequisites

• At least GitHub connected (more integrations produce richer reports).
• Teams configured in Koalr (for team-scoped reports). See Team Setup Best Practices.
• Slack connected (for automated delivery). See Slack Setup.

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Part 1: The built-in Weekly Digest

What the weekly digest includes

Navigate to Reports in the left sidebar. The bottom section of the page shows the Weekly Digest -- an automatically generated summary covering the past 7 days.

The digest includes:

Engineering Health Score -- A composite score from 0 to 100 based on deployment frequency, cycle time, review responsiveness, and SLA compliance. Displayed as a donut chart with a label: Healthy (80+), Needs Attention (60--79), or At Risk (below 60).

Wins -- Automatically detected positive trends, such as:

• Cycle time improved by 15% week-over-week.
• Zero PRs aged beyond 7 days.
• Deployment frequency hit the Elite tier.

Watch Items -- Automatically detected concerns, such as:

• Review time increased by 30%.
• 3 PRs are open longer than 7 days.
• Change Failure Rate exceeded 20%.

DORA Metrics -- Four tiles showing Deployment Frequency, Lead Time (P50), Change Failure Rate, and MTTR with week-over-week trend indicators.

PR Activity -- PRs Merged, Open PRs, Average Cycle Time, and Average Review Time.

Team Activity -- Active Contributors, Commits, PRs in Review Queue, and SLA Compliance rate.

Value Stream snapshot (if available) -- Flow Efficiency percentage, end-to-end lead time, and the current bottleneck stage.

Top Contributors -- Ranked list of the most active contributors showing PRs opened, PRs reviewed, and average cycle time.

AI Insights alert -- If Koalr's AI analysis flagged critical or warning issues during the week, a banner links to the Insights page for details.

Filter by team

Use the team dropdown at the top of the Weekly Digest section to scope all metrics to a specific team. This is useful when delivering team-specific reports to different channels.

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Part 2: Build a custom report

The weekly digest is good for general awareness, but different audiences need different metrics. The report builder lets you assemble exactly the right data for each stakeholder.

Choose your audience

Before building, decide who will read the report and what they care about:

Audience	What they care about	Recommended metrics
Engineering Managers	Team execution, bottlenecks, review health	Cycle time, review time, open PRs, rework rate, team-specific DORA
VPs / Directors	Delivery velocity, stability, headcount efficiency	Deployment frequency, lead time, CFR, throughput per engineer
CTOs / Executives	Business impact, trend direction, risk	DORA tier, change failure rate trend, deploy risk summary, coverage trend
Product Managers	Delivery predictability	Forecasting P50/P85 dates, at-risk PRs, backlog burn rate

Use a template

Navigate to Reports and find the Quick Report Templates section. Templates give you a pre-built starting point:

Template	Contents
Engineering Pulse	DORA metrics + PR cycle time + throughput + review health
Sprint Review	Velocity, completed issues, PR size distribution, cycle time trend
Team Health	Well-being pillars, focus time, burnout signals
AI Impact	Copilot adoption, acceptance rate, Cursor spend
Executive Summary	DORA tier, lead time, deployment frequency, CFR, MTTR
Code Quality	Coverage trend, rework rate, technical debt
Delivery Status	Forecasting dates, at-risk PRs, backlog trend

Click any template to open the report builder with pre-configured sections.

Build from scratch

1. Navigate to Reports and click New Report (or go to /reports/builder).

2. Set the report name (e.g., "Platform Team Weekly" or "VP Engineering Monthly").

3. Choose a date range (Last 7, 14, 30, or 90 days).

4. Add sections by clicking + Add section:

   Metric Grid -- Select up to 6 KPI tiles from categories including DORA, Pull Requests, Flow, Reviews, People, and AI. Good for the top-of-report summary.

   Trend Chart -- A line or bar chart for any single metric over the date range. Good for showing direction (are we improving?).

   Data Table -- A sortable list from data sources like at-risk PRs, stale PRs, top contributors, or failing builds.

   Text Block -- Free-text markdown for context, commentary, action items, or section headers.

5. Drag sections to reorder.

6. Click Save Report.

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Part 3: Schedule delivery

Schedule a report to Slack

1. Open a saved report from the Reports list.
2. Click Schedule.
3. Choose frequency:
   • Daily -- useful for high-velocity teams.
   • Weekly -- most common. Pick the day of week (Monday morning is typical).
   • Monthly -- for executive summaries.
4. Choose delivery channel:
   • Slack channel -- select any connected public or private channel.
   • Email -- enter email addresses.
   • Or both.
5. Save the schedule.

Scheduled reports generate at 8 AM in your organization's configured timezone. The Slack message includes key metric highlights as text and a PDF attachment.

Tips for Slack delivery

• Create a dedicated channel like #eng-metrics-weekly so reports do not get lost in busy channels.
• Use team-scoped reports for team channels -- scope the report to the Platform team and post it to #platform-eng.
• Pin the report in Slack so team members can find it easily.

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Part 4: Export and share

From any report view, you can:

• Export PDF -- download a polished A4 document with charts rendered as vectors. Suitable for printing or attaching to emails.
• Export CSV -- raw data tables for each metric section. Useful for engineering leads who want to do further analysis in a spreadsheet.
• Share a private link -- a URL that requires Koalr login. Share with colleagues who have accounts.
• Share a public link -- a no-auth read-only snapshot with configurable expiry (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or permanent). Good for sharing with stakeholders who do not have Koalr accounts.

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Recommended report configurations

For Engineering Managers (weekly)

Sections:

1. Metric Grid -- PR cycle time P50, review time P50, PRs merged, rework rate.
2. Trend Chart -- Cycle time over the last 30 days.
3. Data Table -- Stale PRs (open more than 7 days).
4. Metric Grid -- DORA: deploy frequency, lead time, CFR, MTTR.
5. Text Block -- Space for the EM to add commentary before sharing.

Schedule: Weekly, Monday 8 AM, to the team Slack channel.

For VPs / Directors (weekly)

Sections:

1. Metric Grid -- Deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR.
2. Trend Chart -- Deployment frequency over 90 days.
3. Metric Grid -- Throughput (PRs/week), work in progress, review culture score.
4. Data Table -- Top contributors.
5. Text Block -- Summary and action items.

Schedule: Weekly, Monday 9 AM, to the leadership Slack channel or email.

For the CTO (monthly)

Sections:

1. Metric Grid -- DORA deploy frequency, lead time, CFR, MTTR.
2. Trend Chart -- Change failure rate over 90 days.
3. Metric Grid -- Copilot adoption rate, Copilot acceptance rate, estimated hours saved.
4. Text Block -- Executive summary paragraph.

Schedule: Monthly, first Monday, via email.

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Verification checklist

• Weekly Digest loads at /reports with data.
• A custom report can be created and saved via the builder.
• Scheduled report generates at the configured time.
• Slack channel receives the report message with PDF attachment.
• PDF export produces a readable document with charts.

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What to do next

• Review the weekly digest every Monday in your engineering sync.
• Create team-specific reports for each team using the builder with a team filter.
• Iterate on report content -- after a few weeks, remove metrics your audience ignores and add ones they ask about.
• For full details on report features, see Custom Reports.