Reduce Change Failure Rate, Reap the Rewards: Better Stability and Productivity

Did you know that elite-performing software teams have a Change Failure Rate of 0–5%? This important engineering efficiency metric can significantly impact your team's success. If your goal is to reach this level of performance, this article will guide you on how to achieve it.

Sections:

‍

Change Failure Rate is one of the four key metrics defined by the DORA framework to measure software delivery performance.

It represents the percentage of changes that result in degraded service or require remediation—for example, changes that lead to service impairment or outages, and necessitate actions like hotfixes, rollbacks, fix forwards, or patches. Note that this doesn't include failures that were not caused by changes the team made; for example, a third-party payment processor going down and causing a failure wouldn't be included because the failure was caused by something that the team has control over.

This metric is important because it highlights the stability and quality of your software delivery process. A high Change Failure Rate can lead to dissatisfied customers, team stress, and lost revenue, while a low rate shows your team is consistently delivering high-quality code.

How to calculate Change Failure Rate?

Calculating your Change Failure Rate is straightforward. Here's the formula:

Change Failure Rate = (Number of failed changes / Total number of changes) x 100

For example, if your team deployed 100 changes in a week and 5 of them resulted in issues that needed fixing, your Change Failure Rate would be:

(5 / 100) x 100 = 5%

It's important to track this metric over time to identify trends and improvements in your development process.  Even if your team isn't at the "elite" level today, the goal is to reduce this rate over time, indicating an improvement in your team's ability to deliver stable, high-quality code.

‍

According to DORA benchmarks, top-performing teams achieve:

• Elite level — Below 5%
• High level — Below 20%

Lower-performing teams have a Change Failure Rate of 40%+.

‍

Here are some key strategies to help your team minimize change failures and improve your overall delivery performance:

Properly collect and tag your data

Ensure you have a system in place to track all changes and their outcomes. This might involve:

• Using feature flags to control the rollout of new changes
• Implementing robust logging and monitoring systems
• Tagging releases and deployments consistently
• Setting up alerting systems to quickly identify when a change has caused issues

Remember, you can't improve what you don't measure. Accurate data collection is the foundation for all your improvement efforts.

Analyze Trends and Patterns

Don't just look at your Change Failure Rate as a single number. Dig deeper to understand:

• Are certain types of changes more likely to fail?
• Do failures occur more often at specific times (e.g., end-of-sprint pushes)?
• Are there particular team members or processes associated with higher failure rates?
• Is there a correlation between the size of the change and failure rate?
• Are there patterns in the types of failures you're seeing?

This analysis can help you identify root causes and focus your improvement efforts where they'll have the biggest impact. Using data visualization tools can  help you spot these patterns more easily.

Clarify understanding of change failure, not deployment failure

It's important to differentiate between failed changes and failed deployments. First, not all failed deployments are a failed change. As mentioned above, a failed deployment caused by something external to the team (like a third-party service going down) is not a failed change.

And conversely, while a deployment might technically succeed, the change itself could still negatively impact users. Here's what to consider:

• Are users experiencing issues even though the deployment "worked"?
• Do technical successes always translate to positive user experiences?
• Could changes be impacting users in ways your deployment metrics don't capture?
• Does your team understand the difference between successful deployments and successful changes?

This approach shifts your focus from technical metrics to user-centered outcomes. By keeping this perspective, you can better align your development efforts with user needs and improve overall service quality.

‍

Improving your Change Failure Rate is about more than just avoiding mistakes—it's about building a system that consistently delivers value. Here are some strategies to help your team enhance reliability:

Implement Robust Testing Practices

Automate testing at all levels to catch issues before they reach production:

• Unit Testing: Validate individual components of your code to ensure they function correctly in isolation. Tools like JUnit for Java or pytest for Python facilitate this process.
• Integration Testing: Test the interaction between different modules or services to identify interface defects. This helps ensure that different parts of your application work together seamlessly.  For this, you can use the tools mentioned above or the libraries provided by the frameworks used in your application.
• End-to-End Testing: This tests the functionality of your application from end to end, including API validation and database queries. This allows you to catch issues that the more targeted unit and integration tests will miss. Tools like Playwright and Cypress can help with this.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):

Implementing CI/CD pipelines will allow you to automatically build, test, and deploy code changes, reducing manual errors and speeding up delivery. (For more, see p.g. 63 of Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley.)

Foster a Blameless Culture

Encourage open, blame-free discussions of failures to promote learning and continuous improvement:

• Conduct Blameless Post-Mortems: After an incident from a failed change, focus on understanding the root causes rather than assigning blame. According to Google's SRE practices, blameless post-mortems help teams learn from failures by analyzing what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future.
• Leverage Trust-Based Tools: Utilize platforms like Multitudes, which support a trust-based environment by providing insights into team dynamics and promoting transparency and accountability.

Invest in Team Training

Keep your team updated on best practices in development, testing, and operations to reduce common failure risks:

• Continuous Learning: The 2024 DORA report emphasizes that continuous improvement is directly related to improving Change Failure Rate (CFR). Teams that adopt a mindset of continuous improvement are more likely to enhance software delivery performance, which includes metrics like CFR.
• Cross-Functional Skill Development: Promote learning across different areas such as development, testing, and operations to build a more versatile team capable of understanding and addressing various challenges.

‍

The Multitudes platform enables teams to track DORA metrics, including Change Failure Rate, alongside other essential productivity and well-being metrics. Offering a comprehensive view of your team's performance, Multitudes helps you pinpoint areas for improvement and monitor progress over time.

To effectively track and analyze Change Failure Rate, teams can use Multitudes, which is an engineering insights platform for sustainable delivery. Multitudes integrates with your existing development tools, such as GitHub and Jira, to provide insights into your team's changes and their impact on users.

With Multitudes, you can:

• Automatically track Change Failure Rate alongside other key metrics to understand patterns
• Get visibility into what types of changes are failing and where improvements are needed
• Identify team collaboration patterns that might be impacting your change success rate

By leveraging Multitudes, you can improve your change failure rate while giving your teams more time to act on insights, enhancing their productivity and satisfaction.

Our clients ship 25% faster without sacrificing code quality.

Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams?

Try our product today!