changefailure

Change failure refers to a deployment or production change that results in an incident, service degradation, or outage, requiring remediation such as a rollback, hotfix, or workaround. It encompasses changes in software, configurations, infrastructure, or related systems where the outcome does not meet expected objectives and a corrective action is needed.

In practice, change failure is often reported as a change failure rate, representing the proportion of changes that fail in production over a given period. Calculation typically involves counting produced changes that required remediation divided by the total number of changes deployed in that period. Definitions vary by organization, but common criteria include changes that trigger incidents, require rollback, or necessitate a hotfix, within a specified time window.

The metric is a component of DevOps and IT operations dashboards, frequently paired with deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and meantime to recovery. A lower change failure rate is generally associated with more reliable software delivery and greater stability, while a high rate signals potential gaps in testing, risk assessment, or change management practices. Organizations may target reductions through improved test automation, more robust staging and canary deployments, feature flags, and better rollback plans, as well as enhanced observability and incident learning.

Common causes of change failures include insufficient testing, misconfigurations, integration issues, dependency changes, and environment drift. Mitigation strategies emphasize shift-left testing, automated validation, incremental releases, rigorous change review, and post-incident analysis to drive continuous improvement. In ITIL-aligned environments, change failure is viewed as an outcome metric linked to the effectiveness of change management processes.