Change Failure Rate: What It Is & How to Measure

Change failure rate (CFR) is a DevOps metric that measures the percentage of changes to production that result in degraded service or require remediation. It serves as an indicator of deployment process reliability and team efficiency in shipping code without causing issues. High change failure rates can lead to financial losses, decreased team morale, customer dissatisfaction, and competitive disadvantages. Common factors contributing to high CFR include lack of proper testing, poor change management processes, insufficient collaboration between teams, complex systems, and absence of gradual rollout strategies. Strategies to reduce CFR involve implementing robust testing practices, adopting continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), using feature flags for controlled rollouts, improving monitoring and observability, focusing on collaboration and communication, implementing automated rollback mechanisms, and conducting thorough post-mortem analyses. Feature management platforms like LaunchDarkly can help optimize CFR by enabling controlled rollouts, quick rollbacks, A/B testing, environment management, and improved observability.