Changelog

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.

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.

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.

Summary of User Roles

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

Connect Employees to Accounts using Suggestions

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.