What is Change Failure Rate?
The percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production.
Definition
Change failure rate (CFR) is the share of production deployments that result in degraded service requiring remediation — a hotfix, rollback, or incident. It is one of the four DORA metrics and the primary measure of delivery quality.
How it’s measured
Divide the number of deployments that caused a failure by the total number of deployments over a period. Failures are typically sourced from incident tools (PagerDuty, incident.io), error tracking (Sentry), or rollback events.
What good looks like
Elite and High performers keep CFR in the 0-15% range; DORA research often cites 5-10% for the strongest teams. A rising CFR signals that speed is coming at the cost of stability.
Why it matters
CFR keeps throughput honest — shipping faster only counts if changes are safe. Tracked alongside deployment frequency, it reveals whether a team is genuinely high-performing or just moving fast and breaking things.
Related terms
Measure Change Failure Rate automatically
DXSignal computes this and every other delivery, quality, and experience metric from the tools you already use.
Get Started Free