change failure rate
also: CFR, deployment failure rate, failure rate
Change failure rate (CFR) is the percentage of deployments or changes that cause failures or require rollback in production. It measures the quality and stability of your release process.
Change failure rate is a DevOps metric that tracks how often code changes, updates, or deployments result in incidents, bugs, or service degradation in production. A lower CFR indicates more reliable deployments.
For example, if you deploy 100 times in a month and 5 of those deployments cause outages or require emergency rollbacks, your CFR is 5%. Industry benchmarks suggest elite teams maintain CFR below 15%, while lower-performing teams often exceed 46%.
CFR is calculated as: (number of failed deployments / total deployments) × 100. It works alongside related metrics like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) to assess overall deployment pipeline health.
Improving CFR typically involves better testing practices, automated quality checks, code reviews, canary deployments, and feature flags that allow safer rollouts.