Change failure rate is a DORA metric that shows the ratio of incidents to deployments as a percentage. Use this metric to help monitor the stability of your service and platform when making releases, as well as measure how effective your team is at implementing changes.
Which reports use Change failure rate?
Change failure rate is available in Home, Retrospective, and Team health insights.
Note: Change failure rate requires an incident configuration. If you do not configure your incidents, you will not see Change failure rate data.
Home
Identify the percentage of deployed changes that resulted in an incident and required attention. Change failure rate provides insight into the quality of deployments and their impact on customers.
Retrospective report
Use Change failure rate in the Retrospective report to ensure teams aren't losing sight of quality. When incidents occur, view the details of those incidents and discuss them with the team. Discuss what caused those incidents and how you can improve.
Team health insights
Team health insights provides either an organization-level or a team-level view of Change failure rate. See how your teams and nested teams are doing across a certain time period.
What does Change failure rate measure?
Change failure rate measures the percentage of deployments to production that result in degraded service. This metric provides insight into the stability of your code, service, and platform releases.
How is Change failure rate calculated?
Change Failure Rate = total incidents in the filters selected / total deployments in the filters selected
A decline in Change failure rate indicates a smaller number of incidents for the number of deployments.
Change failure rate looks at incidents created during the specified time period where a member of the selected team has ever been the assignee of the ticket. If an incident is created during a different time period, but closed during the selected time period, it is not included in the calculation of the metric.
Incidents closed during the selected time period are included in Time to restore services, so the number of incidents for Change failure rate and Time to restore services for a given time period may not match.
Because Change failure rate is the ratio of incidents to deployments, represented as a percentage. If your organization has not configured deployments or has no deployments during the selected time period, but you do have incidents, Flow shows your Change failure rate as N/A because it cannot be calculated. This results in your performance being set to Low according to the benchmarks. If you see this, double-check to make sure your deployments are configured correctly and investigate what might be happening.
Note: Change failure rate is based on the total number of incidents, not only those incidents tied to specific deployments.
Change failure rate benchmarks
The benchmarks displayed for this DORA metric are partially based on the State of DevOps 2021 report (PDF, opens in new tab), and customized for Flow. Flow compares the value of the metric against these benchmarks.
Not all processes and organizations allow for meeting the elite rating. Use the time as a signal to indicate where your team can focus their efforts in removing friction. The goal is continuous improvement rather than meeting a benchmark.