Change Failure Rate
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Change Failure Rate is the percentage of deployments that cause a production incident. Deploy 100 times, 5 cause issues? That's 5% CFR. Elite teams stay under 15%. If your CFR is high, you're shipping bugs faster. The goal: ship fast AND ship safely.
Real Talk
Change failure rate is a DORA metric measuring the percentage of deployments that result in degraded service, require rollback, or need hotfix remediation. Elite performers maintain a rate between 0-15%. High CFR indicates insufficient testing, review, or deployment safeguards. Tracked by correlating deployments with incident timelines.
When You'll Hear This
"Our change failure rate dropped from 25% to 8% after adding integration tests to the pipeline." / "We track which types of changes have the highest failure rate — database migrations are the worst."
Related Terms
DORA Metrics
DORA Metrics are four numbers that measure how well your team delivers software: how often you deploy, how fast code goes from commit to production, how of...
Mean Time to Recovery
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is how fast you bounce back from production incidents. Elite teams recover in under an hour.
Progressive Delivery
Progressive Delivery means rolling out changes gradually instead of flipping a switch for everyone at once.