Change Failure Rate
What Is Change Failure Rate?
Change Failure Rate is the percentage of production changes that cause a failure and require remediation, such as rollback, hotfix, patch, or other corrective action.
Why Change Failure Rate Matters
This metric helps teams understand release quality and production stability. A lower change failure rate usually indicates:
- more reliable releases,
- stronger testing and verification,
- better deployment practices,
- fewer customer-impacting defects.
How To Use Change Failure Rate
Teams usually improve this metric by:
- shipping smaller changes,
- strengthening CI and automated testing,
- using staged rollouts or feature flags,
- reviewing incident patterns after failed releases.
Change Failure Rate should be read alongside the other DORA metrics. High deployment speed alone is not healthy if release quality is unstable.
Related Terms
Related Pages
Move from definition to product context with the most relevant Oobeya pages for this term.
