Faros AI is thrilled to announce Scorecards, a built-in feature that enables engineering organizations to define best practices for their organization and measure its adoption across all their teams. Scorecards' powerful visualization gives companies both a birds-eye view of the entire organization's team health as well as details on each individual team, all in one interactive view. Measurements for the scorecard can be custom-created and incorporate data from productivity, quality, security, cost, and more.

For more details on corecards, see our docs.

The new Release to Deployment Transform feature offers another way to get deployment data into Faros without changing your processes. You can now transform your release data into deployment data directly in Faros. This is great for any team that uses releases to represent code deployments.

With the new transform UI you can specify which subset of your releases represent deployments, what application is getting deployed and which environment you're deploying to.

This is yet another way to get your deployment data into Faros. Alternative methods include instrumenting your pipelines or connecting to a source system like Buildkite.

Reach out to support@faros.ai to figure out which method is right for your teams.

We have made improvements to time durations calculation and associated visualizations to provide more accurate insights. Previously, time durations were computed as the (maxDate - minDate) for data within a specified range, which could lead to incomplete results when data was sparse or events clustered in the middle of the range. The entire time range of data being now leveraged, you may see a decrease in the value of certain metrics, but they will be a more accurate reflection of performance.This change applies to calculations for Weekly Deployment Frequency in the DevOps Management module and for Monthly Pull Request Merge Rate in the Engineering Productivity Module. Gauge charts in module dashboards, and scorecard calculations have been adjusted accordingly.

We have also extended the default duration filter for the DevOps and Engineering Productivity modules from 30 days to 90 days to access a longer history of data for better trend analysis and performance optimization. This change applies to dashboards and related metrics in the Scorecard and team pages. That default duration can of course still be customized based on your specific needs.

Finally, we have updated folder names in the “Faros Reports” collection to better align with their respective modules: The "Quality and Testing" folder is now named "Software Quality", and "Value Stream Analysis" has been renamed "DevOps Management”.

These updates aim to enhance user experience, provide more accurate data insights, and offer greater flexibility in data analysis.

Faros Automations leverage all your Faros data to remove friction and toil in day-to-day engineering operations. Automations can send alerts and reminders, enforce policies, and optimize workflows.

Faros is partnering with n8n, a best-in-class drag and drop automation engine. With Faros Automations, you can build cross-tool, time-saving automations that help improve speed, efficiency, quality, engagement, and business impact.

And, like so many parts of Faros, it's completely customizable. Faros Automations let you generate any action based on your Faros Data!

For example, you can:

• Take action faster with alerting around any generated metrics - Escalate breaches to SLA's with a PagerDuty integration
• Automate cognitively routine tasks - If someone hasn't contributed to a service in a month, remove their access
• Encourage best practices - Notify people on Slack when their GitHub PRs are consistently above the desired diff size
• Create more adaptive governance / policies based on multiple inputs - Add gate to Kubernetes that ensures PR can't be merged until team Quality metrics are improved

To start leveraging Faros Automations please reach out to our team at support@faros.ai

When a Faros Admin is setting a dashboard as a company favorite, they can choose to use a dynamic filter for the favorite. This means that anyone using the favorite link will see the dashboard automatically filtered to their own team.

Faros customers can now use webhooks to integrate their GitHub data into Faros. With webhooks, organizations have much more control over the what, when, and how of their GitHub data ingestion.

With webhooks:

• Data is pushed into Faros in real-time
• Users have more fine-grained control of what data is sent to Faros
• There is less load on the source system
• There is less overhead to manage

For more details on how to use webhooks, see our docs.

Faros now provides out-of-the-box sprint dashboards! These dashboards help agile teams better understand their sprint health. You can check out how accurate your sprint planning is, how much work is getting pushed to the next sprint, and see detailed breakdowns like the one below.

Sprint Details Dashboard

To try out these new dashboards on your data, navigate to the Beta folder in Faros Reports and check out the Sprint Planning Accuracy and Sprint Accuracy dashboards.

Recently we have been investing our resources in improving our backend architecture. As we continue to grow, we want to ensure that we are building on a strong foundation - for us this is the Faros graph database. We have replaced our home-grown graph database with Hasura, an industry-standard open-source GraphQL engine. The main benefits of this migration is performance improvements for our customers, easier maintainability for the Faros team, and a standard, more powerful query interface for customers directly accessing the database API.

Faros has upgraded its charting tool to include the highly anticipated "now" operator, improved customization, and more!

Highlights include:

• Cards support a now() operator to reference the current date-time
• Dashboard filter dropdowns can be customized, giving you more control over what is displayed
• New link cards in dashboards let you easily link to other dashboards
• Enhanced data download allows you to download data for a single question or export a question as a PDF

And even more visualization enhancements and refinements:

• Smarter tooltips offer increased utility in multi-series charts with totals and percentages, time series including days of the week, and more
• Pivot tables are now optimized for snappier performance and allow you to export pivoted data. We also made the columns resizable, and you can now disable/enable row and column totals
• Visualization Charts now support customization of series encompassing over 20 groups
• Chart settings now recognize custom column names
• Introduced a new visualization type, "Detail," which displays a row as an easy-to-read card (note: this feature may have some issues)

We are excited to announce that new configurable Faros Team pages are available for all customers.

Faros Team Pages provide you with a custom landing page for all of your teams. They serve as a one-stop shop to get the most relevant information for a given team, specifically tailored to what is important to you. In Faros Team Pages, team information is displayed in widgets; you have complete control over what is shown and how it is laid out. Widgets integrate data from your org, your dashboards, and third party systems.

Documentation is available here.

You can now arbitrarily organize your data using Faros Paths. Faros Paths work like directory paths in a file system. By associating any of the supported entities with Faros Paths, you can add a hierarchy structure to data within your Faros dashboards. This helps you visualize your data at varying depths. Using filters and click-through behavior, you can achieve the same drill-down experience that you find in many other curated Faros dashboards.

Last week we introduced new dashboard colors to Faros. These vibrant colors are nice to look at, more legible and they are also accessible! Now everyone will be able to see differentiated data in Faros charts.

Don't see the new colors in your charts? If you pre-defined colors in some of your existing charts you'll notice these colors have not been updated. You can keep your existing charts the same or edit their visualization settings to use some of the new colors.

Please note - the default colors are guaranteed accessible for only seven color groupings. If you have charts with more than seven breakouts some of the color combinations may not be accessible.

We've updated your Team Membership widget to now support sub-team views and org counts. This allows you to better understand your org composition at a glance. You can now see a breakdown of

• All the members who roll up to this org
• Who is a direct member of this team
• What teams directly roll up to this org and how large each of them is

Find this improved widget on all of your Team pages. If you wish to disable the sub-teams view, click the edit icon in the upper right-hand corner and define the view to hide sub-teams.

Custom metrics are the newest way that the Faros platform can be customized to perfectly fit your organization's needs. You can now take a specific metric you compute in any of your systems and import it into Faros over the API! While it's easiest to leverage the built-in Faros metrics, custom metrics can fill in any remaining gaps so you have all the data you need.

If you're interested in writing custom metrics to Faros, please reach our to set up a session with us.

You can now export all of your Faros data into your own PostgreSQL or BigQuery database. This allows you to get all of your Faros insights in whatever custom system or visualization software you like! Think Tableau, Looker, Power BI etc.

To try it out navigate to your Source Catalog and select the Metrics Export category. Choose from the selection, create a source and all your Faros insights will be available in your system.

We've released a new out-of-the-box dashboard to help guide conversation in your team's next retrospective meeting. With this dashboard you can easily see what your team has been working on and how you are doing with regards to task and PR hygiene. As with all of our other dashboards, feel free to clone this dashboard and make it your own!

You can find this dashboard under the Beta folder of your Faros Reports collection. Let us know any feedback you have 🙏

Our new Task Cycle Time definition now only takes into account tickets that were marked as In Progress for some duration. Task Cycle Time is now the amount of time it takes for actively worked on tickets to go from
when they were first marked as in progress to when they were last closed.

Previously, we used the same general definition:
the time from when the task first went to in progress to the time the task was finally done. But, if a task never went into progress, we changed the start time to the time from when the task was created.

The problem with this was that if you just had a task sitting around in the backlog for 5 years, and then closed out as "Abandoned", it would look like it had a task cycle time of 5 years. To remedy this, we now only consider tasks that ever went into an "In Progress" state.

To learn more about task cycle time and different definitions of it, check out our docs.

Faros has upgraded its charting tool to now include search, new datetime functions, improved charts, and more!

Highlights include

• Revamped row charts, more chart colors, and other improvements
• New datetime functions to extract component like hour, day, etc, from datetime fields, and other datetime functions such as datetimeDiff and convertTimezone
• More intuitive filtering UI that simplifies multiple filter selection
• Search bar, to easily find charts and dashboards
• Deep copying of dashboards
• Plus additional bug fixes and performance improvements!

You can now get a complete picture of Quality across your entire Software Development Lifecycle using the new QA Module Dashboards. They make it easy to bring together information from many diverse components into a single place. At a glance, you can learn about trends and relationships in your:

• Code Quality from sources like SonarQube or events
• Testing and Deployment from your CI/CD pipeline
• Software Bugs from your ticketing system
• Incidents from a source such as PagerDuty

The Organization-level QA Dashboard shows Quality trends across teams.

The QA Module contains two dashboards that give either a wider or narrower perspective on the metrics. The first is an Organization-level view where someone like a Department Head can get a great overview of how all the teams within the organization are doing on their Quality metrics. The other view is at a Team-level and it’s a great place for an Engineering Manager to really dive into the details of Quality metrics for applications and repositories owned by their individual teams.

The Team-level Dashboard goes into much more detail on a variety of quality metrics.

The QA Module is available under the Quality and Testing folder within Faros Reports. It is a premium add-on in the Faros platform; please contact Faros for more information.

We are introducing a new feature to make it much easier to create charts and reports when our data is spread across multiple tables. Data is now auto-joined for common use cases! You can now skip creating most joins explicitly and go directly from selecting your data to choosing fields on adjacent tables.

Notice that in the example above, you can now filter Pull Request Review based on information from other tables like the Repository or Author and Reviewer directly without declaring a join.

This feature applies everywhere you interact with fields in the Question Editor; Filter, Summarize, Custom Columns, and Sorting. In addition to the fields on the table you are working with, you will now be able to expand related tables and select fields from those as well. The join will automatically be applied on the correct join ID when you run your query.

This feature only looks one level deep at tables directly related to your main table. If you need to do multiple levels of joins, (e.g. TableA join TableB join TableC) you would still need to declare those joins as before. BUT, those declarations are even easier now, too, because the table ID’s will now be automatically populated once you select the table you are joining to.

Once you select the “Pull Request” table to join with, ID’s are automatically populated.

There are still some situations where it does not make sense to have every join pre-defined, so don’t worry if you don’t see the particular relationship you’re interested in; everything will still work like it did before by manually specifying the join tables and ID’s.

In order to provide our customers with custom security policies that meet their needs we added the ability for tenant owners to customize the security policies for their tenant account.

An owner can now modify settings such as:

• MFA enforcement
• User lockout after X password attempts
• Password history
• Idle session timeout
• Force re-login on session expiry
• Maximum concurrent sessions
• Login restrictions based on IP addresses

Faros now provides new reporting tables, one for each default flow. This will improve performance for all cards and queries built on top of these flows! The faros default flows and their new tables are listed below.

1. Lead Time | Flow Duration Lead Time
2. PR Cycle Time | Flow Duration PR Cycle Time
3. Time to Resolution | Flow Duration Time to Resolve

Previously, data for these flows was stored in the Flow Duration table. Data for the flows listed above has now been moved to their new table respectively. The Flow Duration table will continue to store data for custom flows. For more information on flows check out our docs.

If you would like more visibility into your different task dependencies - which task depends on which, and who is blocking what - then you might want to check out the new Task Relationship reporting table.

With this information now available to you for reporting, you can start to answer questions like:

• How many of my team's tasks are currently blocked?
• Which are the most critical blocking tasks that need to be resolved right away?
• What teams are handling a lot of the blocking tickets and tend to be the bottleneck in our development flow?
• How frequently is my team getting blocked and is that trend increasing or decreasing?

Task Relationship information is being extracted from your Task Management System (TMS). The report table will tell you if any _Task A_ is related to a _Task B_ and if that relationship type is either blocked_by, is_blocking or the generic relates_to. See below for an example of the table contents.

Faros now includes a new restricted dashboard collection editable by owners and admins. This is the perfect place to house curated dashboards for your entire organization.

Any user who does not have admin-level permissions will be able to see everything in the collection in a view-only capacity. This lets you share insights broadly without worrying about them being accidentally changed or deleted.

All users can still collaborate on dashboards in the shared reports folder. Once a dashboard and its cards are deemed ready, any admin can move these items into the curated reports collection. Pair this new feature with Favorites and Home Pages to provide all of your employees a Faros experience customized to your company.

As an owner, you can now access billing and subscription information directly within the Faros application.

The "Subscription" tab displays your Faros tier as well as list of modules you have purchased. On the "Billing" tab, you can confirm how many seats you are currently using within Faros, along with the a list of which employees are included in this seat calculation. In addition, you can also view your billing history and see when your next payment is due.

Bookmark your favorite Faros pages for your personal Faros experience or for everyone in your company!

As an admin, you can now highlight the dashboards and pages that are most relevant to your company. You can choose your company’s default landing page and specify which pages will be highlighted in the left-hand menu for easy discovery by everyone in your company.

All Faros users can also set their own personal favorite pages to be highlighted in the left-hand menu and replace the company default landing page with their own custom landing page as needed.September 14, 2022

Faros now allows you to store employment type and employee role information. These fields can now be used to slice and dice your data on new dimensions.- September 1, 2022

For example, you can inspect your team composition or compare your onboarding experience for contractors vs full-time employees.

Preview our new task management dashboards with insights into your sprints, epics, and boards.

Our new task management dashboards let you analyze your boards, epics, and sprints. To access them, go into the new Beta folder in the Faros reports directory.

These dashboards are beta, and will be incorporated into the Engineering Productivity module in the future. Reach out and tell us what you think!

The way the deployment frequency metric is calculated has been updated to better reflect the performance of larger teams and organizations.

Some modifications have been made in how the Weekly Deployment Frequency metric is calculated in the Value Stream Analysis and DORA Summary dashboards. Some of these changes can cause a considerable shift in the value displayed for most customers. See below for a description of the changes made and the reasoning behind them.

1. Deployment frequency is now normalized per application - Instead of displaying the total number of deployments, it is now the number of deployments per application. This definition will scale better for organizations with a large number of applications and, more importantly, it is more in line with the official DORA definition of the metric. While this does mean that the value will decrease in almost all cases (since we are now dividing by the number of applications), we believe it will be a more accurate representation of application development velocity.
2. An issue with computing the metric was fixed where certain weeks that had zero deployments were previously excluded from the overall weekly average calculation.

Faros dashboards now support many more date filter options.

Previously Faros dashboards could be filtered by a relative date timespan. These filters have been upgraded to support many more relative date options as well as specific date ranges and the ability to exclude certain dates. Check out the examples below to see all of the possibilities then play around with the filter in your own Faros dashboards.

Filter by relative dates

Filter by specific dates

You can now distinguish between active and inactive employees in Faros

Employees now how an associated status that can be set to either active or inactive. Employees are active by default, and in general it is only the active employees you will care about and manage in Faros. An inactive employee is someone who is no longer at your company or is on a leave of absence.

Employee status lets you differentiate between employees you care about and continue to produce data (active) and employees who are not contributing new data but should be considered when looking at historic trends. Inactive employees are not considered in the seat calculation used for billing.

Easily convert tasks to incidents in the Faros schema.

Many of our customers track incidents in their ticket management system. It's now easy to quickly identify which tasks represent incidents and then create those incidents in Faros. Doing so will allow you to leverage existing incident metrics in the dashboards or build your own.

Improved Sprint Metrics

Faros now provides two new tables to capture your sprint health data. The Sprint table has aggregated metrics on the number of tasks/points planned, added, moved and removed during each sprint. The Sprint History table gives detailed information on the tasks associated to each sprint.

Play around with role based access control(RBAC) in your Faros app.

Faros now has user roles that determine what a user is able to do in Faros and what data they are able to interact with. For more details check out our RBAC documentation page.

It's now easier than ever to connect your employees to their accounts!

Faros now provides a tool to help you more easily connect employees to their different accounts across all of your different systems. Using intelligent heuristics, Faros provides you with the 'best matches' for your employees. Read more about how to use the new tool here.

Instrumenting your pipelines just got a whole lot easier.

Faros now provides a tool to help you more easily construct the code snippets used for instrumenting integration and deployment pipelines. While you are still able to consult our recipes, the Instrumentation tool walks you through what you should be sending and reduces errors by populating options from the data you already have in Faros. Learn more about CI/CD and how to use the tool in our docs.

Introducing Faros Community Edition (Faros CE)!

Today, we are excited to announce that we have open-sourced a community edition of Faros that is now available for free on GitHub.

Faros CE is a container-based deployment that leverages 100% open-source components. With Faros CE, you get a no-code, flexible, and extensible solution for engineering operational data that is ready in minutes. Read our blog post to find out more!

Check out our new Engineering Productivity module.

This module helps engineering teams track velocity and progress towards current goals across every stage of the SDLC. You can now better understand the unplanned work that may be competing for your team's attention. We also provide industry benchmarks to help you understand what elite/high performant teams look like.

Dashboard sharing is now live.

Easily embed Faros dashboards in Confluence pages, Notion docs and more! Sharing pre-canned reports with the rest of your organization is easier than ever before.

Read more about Dashboard Sharing in the Faros Documentation.

Custom flows are here!

This month, we released a much-awaited feature: enabling our users to define custom flows in Faros.

A Faros flow can be used to describe any organizational process, such as your task management process or your deployment process.

Faros automatically computes various metrics around these flows, such as the end-to-end cycle time for the flow and the time spent in the different custom stages. Use flows to easily identify bottlenecks in your processes.

For more information, visit Custom Flows in the Faros Documentation.

Introducing new DORA dashboards (beta) and Teams Activity Log table.

With the new DORA dashboards, you get an at-a-glance view at how your teams perform as well as the ability to drill down deeper when necessary.

For more information, please view Pre-Built Dashboards in the Faros documentation.

Using the new Activity Log table, you can extend your dashboards to understand how your teams are spending their time: feature work or dealing with incidents.

Introducing new UI for Data Transforms, Faros CI/CD GitHub Action, and Faros CDK for Airbyte connectors.

👷‍♀️ Using our new UI, you can now map custom fields of your source systems to fields of our graph entities. You can also transform entities into other entities (Tasks to Incidents, for example).

🏗 Now you can instrument your CI/CD workflows on GitHub Actions simply by using our Faros CI/CD GitHub Action!

⚡ Write data from any Airbyte source into your Faros graph using the universal Faros Destination for Airbyte. If an input stream is not supported, just use JSONata to transform it, by passing an expression through the config.

🛠 Build your own Airbyte source/destination in TypeScript/JavaScript with Faros AI CDK. For more information, visit the Airbyte site.

Introducing custom dashboards, new dashboards, and Event CLI.

Visualize and track what matters most to your organization! Use our new UI to create your own dashboards with your own custom metrics and charts.

For more information, please look at Custom Dashboards in the Faros documentation.

We now have dozens of new dashboards and hundreds of new charts providing visibility into the Throughput, Speed, Quality, and Investment areas of engineering orgs. The different dashboards provide differing lenses into the metrics, allowing users to drill down into teams, applications, or projects.

Now you can instrument your CI/CD pipelines using our Event CLI.

Get an overview of your lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and more with the DORA metrics dashboard. Simply connect up your CI/CD and source control systems to Faros, and begin to identify bottlenecks in your engineering pipelines and processes.

For more information, please look at our pre-built dashboards in the Faros documentation.

Now, in addition to the programmatic APIs and CLI, you can manage Faros from the Faros Console. The console will be the single place from where you can manage your data sources, schema, applications, and workflows!