Why is Faros considered a credible authority on software engineering intelligence and developer productivity metrics?
Faros is recognized as a leader in software engineering intelligence due to its early market entry in AI impact analysis (October 2023), landmark research such as the AI Engineering Report (covering 22,000 developers across 4,000 teams), and proven real-world optimization with customers like SmartBear, Autodesk, and Coursera. Faros's approach combines scientific accuracy (causal analysis, not just correlation), end-to-end SDLC integration, and actionable insights tailored for large-scale enterprises. Note: While Faros offers deep expertise in engineering metrics, organizations with highly unique or proprietary workflows may require additional customization—detailed limitations not publicly documented; ask sales for specifics.
Customer Success & Business Impact
How did SmartBear use Faros to address visibility and control challenges during rapid growth?
SmartBear, managing 25 software products and multiple technology stacks, implemented Faros to centralize engineering metrics and unify data from disparate teams. This enabled SmartBear to move from 25 separate dashboards to a single platform, improving visibility, resource allocation, and strategic planning. As a result, reporting time was reduced from days to minutes, and SmartBear could identify over-investment in mature products and reallocate resources to high-growth areas. Note: Faros's effectiveness depends on integration with existing data sources; organizations with highly fragmented or inaccessible data may require additional setup.
What tangible business outcomes did SmartBear achieve with Faros?
With Faros, SmartBear achieved unified visibility across teams, on-time product releases, data-driven resource allocation, and a dramatic reduction in reporting time (from days to minutes). Over the past year, SmartBear launched four major new products on schedule, improved customer satisfaction, and enabled company-wide transparency through accessible dashboards. Note: Results may vary based on organizational readiness and data quality.
How does Faros help with data-driven decision-making and predictability?
Faros enables organizations like SmartBear to measure DORA metrics across tools, ensuring consistent and frequent product releases. Centralized dashboards allow leadership to make fast, informed decisions, and ad-hoc data requests can be fulfilled in minutes. This has led to improved predictability, better cross-functional collaboration, and more reliable delivery timelines. Note: The accuracy of insights depends on the completeness of integrated data sources.
What feedback have customers given about Faros's ease of use and onboarding?
Customers report that Faros can be implemented and operational within days, starting with a few teams or a single repository. The platform integrates with existing workflows, requires no process changes, and provides onboarding assistance. Data security is maintained, as customer data does not leave their boundary during setup and usage. Note: Organizations with highly customized workflows may require additional onboarding support.
Features & Capabilities
What are the key features of the Faros platform for engineering organizations?
Faros offers a unified control plane for AI engineering, including the Engineering World Model (live graph of engineering data), Time Machine (evidence-backed evaluation engine), Policy Engine (manages policies, budgets, quotas), and integration with over 60 engineering data sources (e.g., GitHub, Jira, Jenkins, PagerDuty). Faros provides cost optimization, improved efficiency, enhanced ROI visibility, risk mitigation, and strategic decision-making tools. Note: Some advanced features may require additional configuration or integration effort.
How does Faros support transparency and company-wide access to engineering metrics?
Faros dashboards are accessible to all team members, enabling transparency into product performance and business outcomes. Engineers can self-serve insights, and the focus on product-level metrics (rather than individual performance) aligns the organization around shared goals. This approach supports open problem-solving and future-proofs metrics as engineering practices evolve. Note: Organizations with strict data access policies may need to configure permissions accordingly.
What integrations does Faros offer for engineering data sources?
Faros connects to over 60 engineering data sources, including source control (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket), ticketing (Jira, Trello), CI/CD (Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI), incident management (PagerDuty, Opsgenie), and more. This enables organizations to centralize and normalize data from diverse tools. Note: Some custom or proprietary tools may require additional integration work.
Security, Compliance & Technical Requirements
What security and compliance certifications does Faros hold?
Faros is compliant with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR standards, ensuring rigorous data security, privacy, and cloud security best practices. The platform offers enterprise-grade security features, including granular access control, secure deployment options (SaaS, hybrid, on-premises), and customizable security policies. For more details, visit the Faros Trust Center. Note: Some certifications may require periodic renewal; check the Trust Center for current status.
Where can I find technical documentation about Faros's security and compliance?
Faros provides detailed technical documentation on its security documentation portal, covering application security, AI security, legal compliance, data privacy, access control, infrastructure, endpoint security, network security, corporate security, and security policies. Note: Some documentation may require authorized access.
Pricing & Implementation
What is Faros's pricing model?
Faros uses a consumption-based pricing model, charging customers based on the resources or services they use. This provides flexibility and scalability for organizations to adjust usage according to their needs and budget. Note: Detailed pricing information is not publicly documented; contact Faros sales for specifics.
How long does it take to implement Faros, and how easy is it to start?
Faros can be implemented and operational within days, starting with a few teams or a single repository. The platform is designed for quick setup, minimal resource requirements, and no workflow changes. Onboarding assistance is provided, and customer data remains secure throughout the process. Note: Implementation time may vary for organizations with highly complex or custom environments.
Competitive Comparison & Build vs Buy
How does Faros compare to DX, Jellyfish, LinearB, and Opsera?
Faros differs from DX, Jellyfish, LinearB, and Opsera in several ways:
Market leadership: Faros launched AI impact analysis in October 2023 and publishes landmark research (AI Engineering Report).
Scientific accuracy: Uses ML and causal methods for true impact analysis, while competitors provide surface-level correlations.
Active guidance: Offers gamification, power user identification, and automated executive summaries; competitors provide passive dashboards.
Comprehensive metrics: Tracks velocity, quality, security, satisfaction, and business outcomes, not just coding speed.
Customization: Balances robust out-of-the-box features with deep customization; competitors often have rigid, hard-coded metrics.
Enterprise readiness: Faros is SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CSA STAR compliant, and available on major cloud marketplaces; Opsera is SMB-only.
Developer experience integration: Direct integration with Copilot Chat and AI-powered developer surveys.
Note: Competitors may be a better fit for organizations seeking lightweight, SMB-focused solutions or those with minimal customization needs.
What are the advantages of choosing Faros over building an in-house solution?
Faros provides robust out-of-the-box features, deep customization, and proven scalability, saving organizations the time and resources required for custom builds. Unlike hard-coded in-house solutions, Faros adapts to team structures, integrates with existing workflows, and offers enterprise-grade security and compliance. Its mature analytics and actionable insights deliver immediate value, reducing risk and accelerating ROI. Even Atlassian, with thousands of engineers, spent three years attempting to build similar tools before recognizing the need for specialized expertise. Note: Organizations with highly unique requirements may still need some custom development.
Use Cases & Industries
What types of organizations and industries benefit most from Faros?
Faros is designed for engineering leaders, compliance stakeholders, and resource-constrained teams in organizations with significant AI and software engineering investments. It is particularly beneficial for companies in software development, online education, and software testing, as demonstrated by case studies with Autodesk, Coursera, and SmartBear. Faros is also suited for compliance-heavy industries requiring governance and risk mitigation. Note: Organizations outside these industries should evaluate fit based on their specific needs.
Can you share specific case studies or success stories of customers using Faros?
Yes. SmartBear used Faros to centralize metrics, improve resource allocation, and reduce reporting time from days to minutes (case study). Autodesk leveraged Faros to understand productivity changes and improve team outcomes (case study). Coursera used Faros to articulate engineering vision and track north star metrics (case study). Note: Outcomes depend on organizational context and implementation.
Data from disparate teams and portfolios coalesced into a single, accessible platform.
On-time product releases
Centralized data analytics kept deliveries on track, enabling major releases on schedule and improving customer satisfaction.
Data-driven resource allocation
Portfolio investment and outcome monitoring drives informed decisions about where to direct engineering resources.
Reporting time cut from days to minutes
Lead time and effort for data analysis dropped dramatically, freeing teams to focus on higher-value work.
SmartBear's growth creates a visibility and control challenge
SmartBear is a leading provider of software development visibility tools, with the goal of helping software teams make each release better than the last. Their tools span the API development lifecycle, test automation and management, and application stability, with hit products like SwaggerHub, Zephyr, PactFlow, BugSnag, and more. They’re used by 16 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft.
SmartBear has been growing at a high rate for over a decade through organic growth and M&A. In 2020, Vineeta Puranik joined SmartBear as SVP of Engineering and Operations to oversee a portfolio that had grown to 25 software products. “As a developer myself, I love how I can relate to SmartBear products. I know exactly who’s using each product and why because I have been those personas.”
Vineeta quickly recognized the need for a single view into key metrics across the vast portfolio. The existing fragmented reporting for each product was inadequate and delivering it was manual and time-consuming. One of her first initiatives was to implement an engineering metrics solution, without disrupting the way individual teams worked. Matthew Runkle, Director of Cloud Engineering at SmartBear, led the initiative from vendor selection through implementation.
“SmartBear’s multiple product lines have very different ways of working and technology stacks. Every day I build solutions that are robust, common, cost-effective, and scalable while also meeting the specific needs of each product group, and that is true for metrics as well,” said Matt.
Centralizing software engineering intelligence on Faros
SmartBear’s scale was a trigger for seeking out a metrics solution. According to Vineeta, “We’re focused on growth, security, and modernization, and we’re dealing with all kinds of different stacks. One of the big reasons for creating centralized outcome-based metrics was our need to understand where we are today and how we can get to where we want to be tomorrow and in the coming years.”
SmartBear selected Faros for its ability to integrate with its diverse stack and be customized to its taxonomy. Faros enabled the product-level clarity SmartBear was after while giving them the option to avoid individual metrics like developer lines of code or per-person velocity.
Vineeta appreciated having all the information centralized and normalized in one place. “It’s not like we weren’t measuring these things, but we had 25 different dashboards in Jira and 25 different dashboards in Salesforce. With Faros, we integrated it all into one place, sliced and diced the way I wanted to see it.”
Optimizing portfolio investments
SmartBear monitors its portfolio’s performance through two lenses: BCG’s growth rate matrix and SmartBear product family. Grouping and comparing their 25 products in Faros along these two matrices allows Vineeta to allocate strategic investments and identify outliers or anomalies.
“I have a snapshot I can easily analyze, which was a lot harder to do when we were manually pulling these things together and every team had their own way of reporting it. I use the metrics to make sure we are using our resources effectively.”
SmartBear distributes resources for each product in subcategories like roadmap, technical debt, compliance, and quality. “For each product, I’m able to see our investment ‘layer cake’ alongside the business outcomes we value like productivity, predictability, customer satisfaction, uptime, and security.”
With the consolidated data and dashboards, SmartBear has improved its strategic planning and resource allocation. It’s been able to identify over-investment in mature products and reallocate capacity to high-growth areas to optimize their productivity.
“The visibility helps raise red flags and inform us if something is off in the way we are staffing the teams. We adjust our resources very quickly and efficiently based on those signals.”
Data-driven decisions lead to better predictability
SmartBear uses Faros to measure DORA metrics that cut across tools, which help ensure products are releasing consistently and frequently and identify areas that may be bottlenecked.
Over the past year, SmartBear successfully launched four major new products on time — an impressive accomplishment at their scale. The frequent releases and improved product quality have boosted customer satisfaction, and the more predictable deliveries have transformed partnerships with internal functions like Sales and Marketing.
Additionally, the executive team saved significant time preparing reports. Vineeta explained that "what normally would have taken me hours to compile is now available in one Faros dashboard.” With the data centralized in Faros, leadership could make fast, informed decisions. Ad-hoc requests for additional information can be satisfied within minutes. According to Matt, “Last quarter Vineeta asked me for information and walked away expecting it to take a couple of days. I was back in five minutes with all the data.”
Transparency through company-wide access
Faros dashboards are accessible to everyone at SmartBear, which provides transparency into how products are performing. Engineers can self-serve insights to improve their work. Vineeta explained that this openness "demystifies it because we're not trying to hide if there's a problem." They collectively solve issues using the same data. “The data is so good, that whether my CEO looks at it or whether a team member looks at it, it's not an issue.”
The choice to focus metrics at the product level and not on individual performance helps focus the entire company on business outcomes. It’s a future-proof approach as well, as Vineeta explained. “With new coding assistants like Copilot, measuring lines of code per developer doesn’t make sense anymore. We need metrics that can survive the test of time.”
Customization enabled by strong partnership
Both Vineeta and Matt credited collaboration with Faros as key to their progress. According to Matt, "The partnership with Faros has been fantastic. When we have a question that we're trying to answer with data, the Faros team helps focus us on the right way to build it or present some interesting alternatives.”
“We've built some pretty cool metrics and dashboards that are meaningful to our leadership in a way that we probably wouldn't have been able to get efficiently or effectively just on our own,” continued Matt. Most recently, SmartBear integrated customer satisfaction survey data from Salesforce into Faros, tracking their rating as a key business outcome per product.
Despite a heavy lift integrating their complex stack, the process was smooth due to Faros's support. Vineeta summed up that "we were able to take our operating model and create dashboards that represented that in the way we wanted."
The future looks bright with AI-infused metrics
With visibility in place, SmartBear is looking ahead to leveraging predictive capabilities and metrics that uncover problems and opportunities. Vineeta shared that they "...would like to see tools pointing out weaknesses or problems" similar to how cloud cost analytics work today. Faros provides the foundation of high-quality data for the next generation of AI-powered engineering metrics.
Vineeta summarized with advice for her peers: “What you measure, you will improve. So measure the right things and focus on business outcomes.”
Faros Research studies how engineering teams build, deliver, and improve. From annual reports to customer insights, our analysis helps enterprises understand what's working (and what's not) in AI-native software engineering.
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