Why Does SonarQube Pass Project A's Quality Gate but Fail Project B's Despite Higher Overall Issues?

I’m experiencing a strange behavior in SonarQube with two long-standing projects, Project A and Project B. Both projects have existed for a while across different products, but I’m noticing a discrepancy in how their quality gates are evaluated:

Version: Enterprise/Data Center edition 9.9.6

Project A:

  • Quality Gate: Passed
  • New Code Statistics:
    • 0 New Bugs
    • 0 New Vulnerabilities
    • 0 New Security Hotspots
    • 0 Added Debt
    • 0 New Code Smells
    • 88.5% Coverage
    • 0.0% Duplications
  • Overall Code Statistics:
    • 121 Bugs
    • 89 Vulnerabilities
    • 103 Security Hotspots
    • 120d Debt
    • 12k Code Smells
    • 71.4% Code Coverage
    • 3.1% Duplications on 305k Lines

Project B:

  • Quality Gate: Failed
  • New Code Statistics:
    • 4 New Bugs
    • 0 New Vulnerabilities
    • 1 New Security Hotspot
    • 20d Added Debt
    • 723 New Code Smells
    • 16.0% Coverage
    • 2.56% Duplications
  • Overall Code Statistics:
    • 4 Bugs
    • 0 Vulnerabilities
    • 1 Security Hotspot
    • 64d Debt
    • 2.6k Code Smells
    • 16.0% Code Coverage
    • 2.9% Duplications on 98k Lines

My question is:

Why is the quality gate failing for Project B, but not for Project A? Despite Project A having more overall issues, it passes the quality gate, while Project B fails it. What could be the reasons for this discrepancy? Any insights would be appreciated!

Hi @geojoseph,

You are using a quality gate which is more tolerant with overall the code then new code. Maybe the default quality gate. You can display the configured quality gate in Project Information.