Change Failure Rate (CFR)
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Change Failure Rate (CFR) is a software product operations measure which quantifies the percentage of deployments that lead to failures in production, necessitating deployment remediation actions (like deployment fixes, deployment patches, or post-deployment rollbacks).
- Context:
- It can gauge the quality and stability of teams' releases.
- It can offer insights into the reliability of the deployment process.
- It can address the question: "How often do our production changes lead to incidents or outages?"
- It can highlight potential improvement areas, where a high Change Failure Rate might indicate insufficient testing or a problematic deployment process.
- It can be recognized as a crucial component within the DORA Metrics framework.
- It can serve as an early warning sign for issues in the software development lifecycle, prompting proactive investigations.
- It can guide teams in identifying patterns, especially if specific modules or features consistently contribute to a higher CFR.
- It can assist in optimizing resource allocation by highlighting where additional testing or development resources might be beneficial.
- It can contribute to stakeholder discussions about balancing release velocity with stability.
- It can inform decisions on adopting or revising release strategies, such as canary releases, blue-green deployments, or feature flags.
- It can support root cause analyses by pointing to problematic releases or deployment trends over time.
- It can act as a feedback mechanism for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline improvements.
- …
- Example:
- If a team has 5 deployments in a day and 2 of them result in failures, the Change Failure Rate is 40%.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: DORA Metric, Software Delivery Performance Measure, Deployment.
References
2023
- chat
- Q: What is Change Failure Rate and how is it measured?
- A: Change Failure Rate (CFR) measures the percentage of deployments that result in failures within a production environment, requiring remediation such as patches, fixes, or rollbacks. It evaluates the stability and quality of releases by teams. You can determine the CFR by dividing the number of deployments causing failures by the total number of deployments. For instance, if there are 5 deployments in one day and 2 lead to failures, the CFR is 40%. The metric is crucial within the DORA Metrics framework and serves to understand the reliability of the deployment process.
2022
- https://jellyfish.co/blog/change-failure-rate/
- QUOTE: 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.
- QUOTE: Simply divide the number of deployments that cause failures by the total number of deployments. If your team deployed five times today and two of them resulted in failures, your change failure rate is 40%.
- QUOTE: As a software development organization, our goal is always rapid and stable delivery of software to end users. That is the DevOps way after all. When the business pushes for faster delivery timelines, more new features, expanded roadmaps, etc., it can be tempting to optimize for speed at the expense of stability or quality. But we all know that approach will come back to harm us in the long run.