Changelog

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.

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 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 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.

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.