How to Automate Your Engineering Status Report

The "Weekly Status Report" is a double-edged sword. Done well, it builds trust with stakeholders and protects your team from interruptions. Done poorly, it’s a time-sink that everyone ignores.

If your team is using ZenHub, you are already doing 90% of the work just by moving issues through your pipelines. Here is how to automate the final 10% and never manually write a status report again.

Step 1: Define Your "North Star" Metrics

Stakeholders typically care about three things:

1. What did we ship? (Velocity and Closed Issues)
2. Are we on track? (Sprint progress vs. Goals)
3. Are there bottlenecks? (In-Progress issues and blockers)

Step 2: The Old Way (Manual)

Usually, this involves scrolling through the "Closed" list in ZenHub, counting story points, and summarizing it in an email. This is prone to missing items and takes up your most productive morning hours.

Step 3: The Automated Way (The ZenStat Method)

With ZenStat, you can automate this entire process in three minutes:

1. Connect Your Workspaces: Link your primary GitHub/ZenHub workspaces to ZenStat.
2. Set Your View: Choose the workspaces you want to report on.
3. The Screenshot Play: ZenStat’s dashboard is designed to be visual. Instead of writing a wall of text, simply take a screenshot of your ZenStat metrics.

The clean UI clearly shows:

• Velocity: Proving your team is hitting their targets.
• Issues Closed: A concrete list of wins.
• Workload: Showing exactly what the team is currently tackling.

Step 4: Add the "Human Layer"

Automation handles the numbers; you provide the context. Spend 5 minutes adding 2 bullet points to your automated metrics:

• What we learned this week.
• One thing that might block us next week.

The Result: Better Visibility with Zero Effort

By automating your reporting, you ensure that leadership always has a clear, data-driven view of engineering performance. You look organized, the team looks productive, and you didn't have to touch a single spreadsheet.

Ready to automate your first report?

Try ZenStat Now