Change Failure Rate measures the percentage of deployments that lead to incidents, rollbacks, or hotfixes. It is the quality counterweight to the speed-focused DORA metrics.
What it measures
Of every deployment in the period, what share resulted in a failure within an attribution window.
How Leanmote calculates it
change_failure_rate = (failed_or_degraded_deployments / total_deployments) * 100
A deployment is counted as failed if it triggers an incident, a rollback, or an emergency fix within the configured attribution window (typically 24 hours or 7 days).
Tracked by service and by team to isolate hotspots rather than blame the whole organization.
How to interpret it
Below 15% is generally considered healthy in DORA's elite-team benchmarks.
Trending up while frequency rises — you may be trading quality for speed. Investigate test coverage and release process.
Spikes after a process change are normal but should normalize within 2–3 cycles. If they don't, roll back the change.
What to do about it
Strengthen pre-merge testing — unit, integration, and contract tests.
Add canary or progressive rollout so failures are caught before full exposure.
Tighten the attribution window when incident attribution is noisy.
Pair with MTTR — a higher failure rate is more tolerable when recovery is fast.
Related metrics
Deployment Frequency
Mean Time to Recovery
DORA metrics overview