What is Change Failure Rate

Change Failure Rate is one of the key metrics developed by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization to measure the performance of software development and delivery teams. Change failure rate measures the percentage of deployments that result in a failure in production, which ultimately requires some type of remediation (to be fixed, patched, or rollback after they are deployed). It is a measure of the quality and stability of your teams’ releases.

Interpreting Change Failure Rate

Ideally, the Change Failure Rate should be as close to zero as you can get it.

High-performing teams typically have rates that fall between 0% and 15%.

That's the benchmark, the standard that teams need to maintain. Teams should have the right incident response processes in place to meet that standard. And maintaining good standards is dependent on the team maintaining code review best practices.

If your team's rate rises above 15%, it means you're spending too much time fixing problems. This will result in longer downtimes, which means reduced productivity. Review your processes and find the right solutions. High-performing teams can resolve multiple issues in a day; as a result, they have little downtime.

Change Failure Rate according to Google’s Accelerate State of DevOps reports

According to Google’s Accelerate State of Devots reports 2022, performance can be evaluated in the following way:

1. Low: Change Failure Rate is 46-60%.

2. Medium: Change Failure Rate is 16-30%.

3. High: Change Failure Rate is 0-15%.