Calculate the DORA change failure rate from deployments that caused incidents.
Change Failure Rate (CFR) is one of the four key DORA metrics, measuring the percentage of deployments to production that result in a degraded service and require remediation (rollback, hotfix, patch). Formula: CFR = failed_deployments / total_deployments × 100. DORA's research-backed benchmarks classify teams as Elite (<5%), High (<10%), Medium (<15%) or Low (≥15%) performers based on this rate.
change_failure_rate = (failed_deployments / total_deployments) × 100
Any deployment that causes a service degradation requiring remediation — this includes rollbacks, hotfixes, patches, or incidents directly attributable to the change, not just deployments that technically failed to complete.
DORA's research shows elite performers achieve both high deployment frequency AND low change failure rate simultaneously — the two aren't a tradeoff for high-performing teams, since better automated testing, smaller batch sizes and progressive delivery reduce failures while increasing speed.
CFR is scoped specifically to changes deployed to production that cause a production incident or require remediation, not all bugs found in QA or all defects reported by users — it's a delivery-pipeline health metric, not a general quality metric.
DORA benchmarks are typically measured over a rolling window of weeks to months with enough deployments (dozens or more) to avoid a single incident skewing the percentage disproportionately.