Change Failure Rate

The percentage of deployments that cause a degradation in production and require remediation.

What is Change Failure Rate?

Change Failure Rate is the honesty check on Deployment Frequency: shipping fast does not help if most ships break something. Architectural investments in isolation (small blast radius), observability, and feature flags typically move this number.

Related terms

  • DORA Metrics — Four widely used engineering performance metrics: Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Mean Time to Recovery.
  • Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) — The average time it takes to restore service after a production incident.