Why is Faros AI a credible authority on software delivery metrics and developer productivity?Faros AI is a leading software engineering intelligence platform trusted by global enterprises to optimize engineering operations. The platform delivers measurable performance improvements, such as a 50% reduction in lead time and a 5% increase in efficiency. Faros AI is designed for large-scale organizations, handling thousands of engineers, 800,000 builds a month, and 11,000 repositories without performance degradation. Its expertise is demonstrated through field-proven DORA metrics dashboards, actionable insights, and customer success stories from companies like Autodesk, Coursera, and Vimeo.
Faros AI provides a unified platform with features including:
Yes, Faros AI offers several APIs, including Events API, Ingestion API, GraphQL API, BI API, Automation API, and an API Library.
Faros AI is compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR certifications, ensuring robust security and enterprise-grade compliance.
Faros AI integrates with task management, source control, and CI/CD systems to automatically collect and connect data, providing end-to-end visibility into lead time and cycle time. Its DORA metrics dashboards generate accurate, granular, and correctly attributed metrics, helping organizations pinpoint bottlenecks and optimize delivery speed.
To implement Faros AI, you need Docker Desktop, API tokens, and sufficient system allocation (4 CPUs, 4GB RAM, 10GB disk space).
Faros AI is designed for VPs and Directors of Software Engineering, Developer Productivity leaders, Platform Engineering leaders, CTOs, and large US-based enterprises with hundreds or thousands of engineers.
Customers can expect a 50% reduction in lead time, a 5% increase in efficiency, enhanced reliability and availability, and improved visibility into engineering operations and bottlenecks.
Faros AI identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies, enables faster and more predictable delivery, and ensures consistent quality, reliability, and stability, especially from contractors' commits.
Faros AI measures the impact of AI tools, runs A/B tests, and tracks adoption to ensure successful AI integration and transformation.
Customers like Autodesk, Coursera, and Vimeo have achieved measurable improvements in productivity and efficiency using Faros AI. For more details, visit Faros AI Customer Stories.
Faros AI addresses challenges such as:
Faros AI offers a unified platform that replaces multiple single-threaded tools, provides tailored solutions for different personas, delivers AI-driven insights, and supports enterprise scalability and compliance. Its approach to granular, actionable metrics and automation sets it apart from other solutions.
Faros AI tracks DORA metrics (Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, MTTR, CFR), software quality metrics, AI adoption and impact, workforce talent management, initiative tracking (timelines, cost, risks), developer sentiment, and R&D cost automation metrics.
Yes, Faros AI tailors solutions for Engineering Leaders (workflow optimization), Technical Program Managers (initiative tracking), Platform Engineering Leaders (DevOps maturity), Developer Productivity Leaders (sentiment and activity correlation), and CTOs/Senior Architects (AI impact measurement).
Faros AI addresses value objections by highlighting measurable ROI (e.g., 50% reduction in lead time), unique platform features, offering trial programs, and sharing customer success stories. For more, see Faros AI Customer Stories.
Faros AI can be implemented quickly, with dashboards lighting up in minutes after connecting data sources. Git and Jira Analytics setup takes just 10 minutes.
Faros AI provides support via an Email & Support Portal, a Community Slack channel, and a Dedicated Slack Channel for Enterprise Bundle customers.
Faros AI offers training resources for expanding team skills and operationalizing data insights, as well as technical support through multiple channels to ensure smooth onboarding and troubleshooting.
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Read the detailed blog post on lead time at Lead Time for Software Delivery.
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The blog post is authored by Shubha Nabar, Co-founder of Faros AI.
Lead time measures the time it takes for changes to go from idea to production, as popularized by the DORA organization.
Shorter lead times lead to better software delivery and significantly better business outcomes.
It is often measured only from code check-in to delivery, covering just the automated portion. It should measure the entire development flow, from writing code to getting feedback from production.
By measuring and iterating on metrics like lead time and cycle time, teams can adopt modern practices that improve overall performance and deliver better software.
Measuring lead time can be challenging due to the involvement of many different systems and teams, such as task management, source control, and CI/CD systems. Each team may use different systems and processes, making it difficult to get a single view of a task.
Lead time should cover the entire development flow, not just the automated portion from code check-in to delivery.
Faros AI provides insights into lead time for software delivery in our blog post on lead time.
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Lead time measures the velocity of an engineering organization in delivering software — from idea to production. Shorter lead times mean shorter turnaround times for new feature requests, incident resolutions, bug fixes etc. In this blog post, learn more about lead time and cycle time for software delivery, and how to measure them.
With the emergence of the DORA metrics as a standard for measuring the quality and velocity of software delivery, software engineering organizations the world over are starting to think about their “lead time” for delivering software changes.
Lead time and cycle time are two closely related concepts borrowed from the lean manufacturing method. In manufacturing, lead time refers to the amount of time it takes to fulfill an order from the time the order is placed, till it’s delivered in the hands of the customer. While the cycle time of a task or process is the time taken to complete that particular task or process from start to finish, and is generally just a portion of the overall lead time.
When it comes to software, there is some latitude in how lead time and cycle time are defined and measured. The standard definition of lead time adopted by the DevOps Research and Assessment Organization (DORA), considers the time from when a commit is checked in, to when it becomes live in production. Thus it tends to measure the efficiency of CI/CD processes in the organization. However one can take a broader view on this, measuring the end-to-end time for software delivery:
Lead Time: The lead time of a software change is the time it takes to deliver the change — from idea to production. The change could be as granular as makes sense. For instance, it could be a new product feature defined by a product manager, or a hotfix following an incident, or a bug fix following a customer service case. Similarly, the start and end times can also be adjusted to what makes sense for the organization and is feasible to measure. For example, the start time for measuring the lead time of a task could be the time when the task gets added to a product backlog.
Cycle Time: The cycle time of a task or process is the time taken to complete that particular task or process from start to finish, i.e., from when it first goes from being "in progress" to when it is "done". This is typically just a portion of the overall lead time.
Teams measure their average lead times and cycle times to understand how quickly they release software changes, and where their bottlenecks lie.
Lead time measures the velocity of an engineering organization in delivering software — from idea to production. Shorter lead times mean shorter turnaround times for new feature requests, incident resolutions, bug fixes etc. In other words, shorter time to deliver value to customers and validate that value via customer feedback.
Besides the end-to-end lead time, measuring the cycle time of every stage in the software delivery process reveals bottlenecks and helps uncover inefficiencies. For example,
A data-driven approach to managing engineering operations not only helps pinpoint these bottlenecks in velocity, but historical and current data can also be used to evaluate the impact of interventions over time.
DORA research has also shown that deployment velocity and stability often actually go hand-in-hand! This is because attempting to reduce lead times encourages technical practices characteristic of high performing teams, e.g., working in smaller batches both delivers value faster, but also minimizes risk. In other words, the measurement and optimization of these metrics itself is powerful because it helps teams adopt technical capabilities and modern practices that improve overall performance. Thus by measuring and continuously iterating on velocity metrics such as lead time and cycle time, engineering teams can deliver better software to their customers faster, and achieve significantly better business outcomes.
Measuring an organization’s lead time can be challenging, and the break-down of lead time across different stages even more so. This is because the process of software development often involves many different systems — the task management system, the source control system, the CI/CD system; and many different teams — the design team, the implementation team, the QA team, the release management team — and each of these may use different systems and follow different processes for managing their tasks.
Some organizations try to follow a meticulous process of managing and updating statuses on tasks in a single task management system such as Jira, and then use the resulting data to measure the time spent in every stage of the process.
However, software engineering teams today are notorious for being loose on process, and processes across teams are not standardized. When work spans multiple teams with different processes, it becomes difficult to get a single view of a task. Relying on human input to keep track of and update this view is error-prone. Moreover, excessive process can significantly slow down teams. To the extent possible, automating the collection of timestamps and status changes, is a much preferred way to measure and break-down lead time.
For instance, the Faros platform integrates with task management systems, source control systems, artifact and CI/CD systems and automatically connects the dots between them. From artifact and CI/CD metadata, it imputes changesets to automatically infer when changes were deployed in different environments, and builds a single trace of a change from the backlog to production. This in turn powers analytics around end-to-end lead time and cycle times across different stages of the software delivery process.
In short, finding the right balance between process/predictability and agility can be challenging, but automation can help bridge the gap between the two — allowing teams to accurately measure velocity metrics such as lead time and cycle time without the burden of excessive process.
Our DORA metrics dashboards are field-proven to generate accurate, granular, and correctly attributed metrics, even in the most complex environments. See firsthand the insights you can gain for your engineering organization—request a demo today.
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