GUIDE
Change Failure Rate: What It Is and How to Calculate It
One of the 4 DORA metrics — the share of deploys that end up causing an incident.
What it measures
Change failure rate is the percentage of deploys to production that result in a degraded service, an outage, or any other incident requiring remediation. It's the metric that keeps the other three honest — deployment frequency and lead time reward speed, and change failure rate is the check that speed isn't coming at the cost of stability.
How to calculate it
Divide the number of deploys that caused an incident by the total number of deploys over the same period, expressed as a percentage. The part that actually requires a decision is what counts as "caused" — the cleanest approach is to only count an incident that started within a defined window after a deploy (an hour, for instance), so unrelated problems that happen to occur around the same time don't inflate the number.
Elite vs. typical performance
DORA's research has consistently found elite and high performers cluster in a low range — well under a third of deploys causing a failure, often much lower — while lower performers sit meaningfully higher. Treat the exact cutoffs as a general sense of scale rather than a strict scorecard, since the precise bands have shifted slightly across different years of the State of DevOps Report.
How moasy.tech computes it
moasy.tech ties change failure rate directly to incidents, not to guesswork from ticket labels. A deploy only counts as a failure when a real incident — synced read-only from Waroom or incident.io and classified by your own configurable rules (team override, with a company-wide default as fallback) — lands within a configurable window after it. incident.io doesn't yet resolve an incident to a specific team the way Waroom does, and change failure rate requires a team-linked incident, so incident.io data syncs but doesn't factor into this number until that catches up.
See the other 3 DORA metrics in the full guide, or the complete implementation on the DORA Metrics feature page.
Questions about change failure rate
Is change failure rate the same as counting bug tickets?
No — it's tied to deploys, not tickets. A deploy only counts as a failure when a real incident lands within a window after it. Not every bug ticket is a production incident, and not every incident traces back to a deploy.
What counts as an "incident" for this metric?
That's configurable, not fixed — severity classification rules (which incidents count as a real failure versus purely informational) can be set per team, with an org-wide default as a fallback, since what one team treats as a real incident can differ from another's threshold.