Faros AI: Unveiling the Asimov Release

We’ve got some exciting news to share. Today we’re announcing ‘Asimov’, a major product release that includes a ton of new features designed to maximize the potential of engineering teams and help organizations soar at a time when budgets might be feeling the pinch and AI coding assistants are joining the party.

A Word on the Name "Asimov"

First off, why the name "Asimov"? While we're fans of the legendary sci-fi author, this isn't just a nod to his genius. Much like how Asimov envisioned the future, this release aims to shape the way we approach software engineering intelligence at the moment AI has us reimagining the entire discipline.

This release has four main themes:

• Maximizing return on engineering budgets
• Reducing risk to business outcomes with heatmaps and health panels
• Accelerating the transition to data-driven engineering with Lighthouse AI
• Extra goodies that will delight existing and future users

So let’s dive in!

ROI-Centric EngOps Modules

In today's fast-paced tech landscape, understanding the return on your investments is paramount. We’re delivering on that need with three new EngOps modules.

Modules are prebuilt analytics libraries — inclusive of all the data sources, metrics, dashboards, widgets, and customizations you need — that run on top of the Faros AI platform.

Our EngOps modules are infused with productivity expertise, benchmarks, and best practices to provide rapid time-to-value when you connect up your sources. You can build upon the module’s foundation to get limitless insight into your organization by creating your own custom metrics, views, and reports.

Joining our popular modules for Engineering Productivity, DevOps Management (DORA), and Software Quality, the Asimov release includes:

• AI Transformation module
• Initiatives Tracking module
• Developer Experience module

AI Transformation: Quantify the impact of new tools like GitHub Copilot

Are you considering investing in new AI technology to increase productivity and improve the developer experience? Are you wondering whether you should adopt new coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and whether your company can tunnel the productivity gains toward better outcomes?

The AI Transformation module is designed to get those questions answered with data.

ICYMI: Learn how GitHub and Faros AI co-designed the AI Transformation module

With Faros AI, you can ground your AI pilots and evaluations with data that validates the business case, and then find the best ways to put the productivity boost to good use (which may be different from team to team). This module combines quantitative systems data with qualitative developer sentiment to build your cost/benefit analysis.

You’ll get before-and-after metrics and estimates of cost and time savings as well as a sense of the downstream business outcomes you can look forward to.

You can read about Faros's own A/B test of GitHub Copilot in this blog and watch the video below for a tour of the module.

Initiative Tracking: Get visibility into engineering resources

Top of mind for every engineering leader and technical program manager are questions like:

• What are people currently working on?
• How are strategic cross-org initiatives progressing?
• What’s going well?
• Where are the issues?

The Initiative Tracking module answers those questions and then some. It’s where you come to make sure engineering is appropriately staffed and working on the right things and your most high-priority projects. You can keep critical work on track and understand what is running behind, and you can utilize this visibility to make better decisions with your partners in Product and Finance.

Visibility into all your initiatives, sliced and diced the way you want to look at it, will help you make faster and sounder decisions based on progress to goal, estimated remaining time, completed and outstanding work, and who’s working on what. Below is a taste of the module's dashboards.

The Initiative Summary view helps quickly identify risks based on timelines and costs

Predict delivery delays and understand resource utilization with Initiative Tracking

Developer Experience: Understand how sentiment correlates to systems data

Want to act faster on developer feedback? Curious to see how their sentiments correlate to system data? Need to measure whether the action plans you’ve put in place together with HR are having the desired benefit on both people and systems?

The new Developer Experience module helps organizations leverage employee surveys to their full potential. It blends the qualitative insights from Agile, team health, and developer experience and satisfaction surveys with quantitative metrics and outcomes. It centralizes survey data and tracks it over time, juxtaposed with the engineering telemetry that correlates with each sentiment.

Because every organization is unique, this module is highly configurable. You define the survey themes and categories, and you select the corresponding EngOps metrics to overlay on them. To get you up and running quickly, you can also leverage our pre-packaged survey templates, categories, and metrics based on industry benchmarks and best practices.

Cross-org Heatmaps and Team Health Panels Deliver the Right Level of Insight, Fast

Picture this: You're sipping your morning coffee and open your laptop. With just a quick glance at your screen, you're able to take the pulse across the scope of your responsibilities and reduce the risk of missing something important.

That’s exactly what we’ve built in Faros AI. Whether you’re the SVP of Engineering or a Team Lead, you now have a single view that intuitively tells you where to focus your attention.

Let’s talk about Scorecards first.

Scorecards

Scorecards are organizational heatmaps that track the most important metrics across engineering, typically as determined by senior leadership. Often, that’ll be a mix of Agile and DORA Metrics, productivity metrics, and satisfaction metrics. It’s a little different for everyone, that’s why it’s completely configurable. It’s a place for your organization to set the standardized metrics you want everyone aligned on.

Once the scorecard is configured, Faros provides a powerful birds-eye view of the entire engineering organization that highlights performance hotspots. Jump to a specific group or team’s performance for more details, context, and insight, and then dive into underlying dashboards to proactively address the issue.

Scorecards in Faros AI help leaders identify hotspots at a glance and drill in for details and context

TeamCentral

We’ve all heard of service catalogs, but how about a team catalog? One place you can go to get all the information you need about a specific team. That’s the dream.

TeamCentral does just that. It’s got everything a manager or team member will want to see in one place, which helps reduce the time it takes to identify problems, spot conflicting priorities, and keep things running smoothly.

TeamCentral can be personalized with widgets for speed, quality, predictability, and sentiment metrics. It also features essential operational data like who’s on call, app and service ownership, and what the team is actively working on.

TeamCentral centralizes everything you need to know about the team and is completely customizable

AI-boosted Data Analysis and Workflow Automation

The high-quality data in Faros provides the foundation for the next generation of AI-powered engineering metrics. With the announcement of Lighthouse AI in July, there are some great new features to supercharge your insight into your organization’s health and impact.

An AI helper to build custom metrics

One of the most beloved capabilities of Faros AI is the ability to build your own charts. With all due respect to out-of-the-box metrics and dashboards, every company has its own unique reporting needs and ad-hoc business needs that need fast answers.

Lighthouse AI will get you those insights faster. Now you can use a GenAI prompt to ask Faros a business question, and Faros will suggest charts and tables that hold the answer, provide key information about the data, and supply tips and tricks on how to build your query.

Lighthouse AI uses GenAI to supercharge data analysts building custom metrics to answer business questions

Natural language explainers for any chart

Not sure what a chart is trying to tell you? Lighthouse AI now explains every chart in natural language, whether it’s been custom-built or came out of the box. Simply mouse over the Lighthouse AI icon for a clear explanation that helps laypersons understand the metrics better and act on them more confidently.

GenAI chart explanations by Lighthouse AI help understand the metrics better and act on them more confidently

Automations to remove toil and repetitive work

We all want AI to take care of repetitive tasks, communication overhead, and burdensome work so that humans can operate at a higher level. To that end, we’re launching Faros Automations in this release.

You can easily create multi-step workflows that offload reminders, alerts, and notifications to Faros AI.

Here are some cool automations you might want to try:

• Send a Slack or PagerDuty notification when a metric breaches an accepted threshold
• Email a bi-weekly summary of recently released features to your stakeholders
• Update a spreadsheet when a vulnerability is detected
• Send a weekly image of a dashboard to stakeholders

You can read an example of how the Faros engineering team utilizes automations to send a weekly internal update on what's been released in our blog.

Example of a Faros AI automation that sends a Slack alert and creates a Jira issue when CFR exceeds threshold

Other Goodies: Webhooks, UX improvements, survey data, and more

There are a few more goodies in Asimov I want to share.

• Faros AI now supports Webhooks for data ingestion — where a webhook built into the data source can push data to the Faros platform. This is a great option for organizations with specific security restrictions or performance limitations that preclude them from using pull-based connectors. Read our article on webhooks vs. connectors to learn which option is best for you.
• Navigation in Faros is now more intuitive and streamlined. The left-hand menu has shortcuts to a user’s most popular view, including home pages, favorites, dashboards, and TeamCentral. Users can now easily navigate to Modules and the Scorecard using new menu buttons on the top of the screen. And admins can easily toggle the menu to view admin-exclusive Setup Pages.
• You asked for it, you got it! Admins can now customize what each role in Faros can view and do. For example, you can configure whether Analysts can view the Scorecard and Executives can view TeamCentral.
• We’ve made it easier to track the adoption of Faros within your organization as you expand your journey into data-driven engineering. Faros usage data is now part of our reporting database, so you can report on who’s been logging in and which dashboards get the most views.
• Finally, Faros’s connected schema now supports survey data, which makes it possible to utilize insights from health, retro, and satisfaction surveys within the context of everything else you’re measuring. Leverage predefined survey types like NPS, eNPS, quality, satisfaction, speed & agility, alignment & goals — or create your own.

That’s All, Folks (For Now)

We hope you’re as excited as we are about these new capabilities and the opportunities they create to become much stronger, data-driven engineering organizations.

Want to learn more or see Faros AI in action? We’d love to talk — so, please reach out!