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Change failure rate metric

December 29, 2025 4 min read

Change failure rate metric

Example: Your Toy Robot Game! 🤖

Let’s say you’re building a toy robot game:

  • Week 1: You made 5 changes

    • 1 change made the robot move backward instead of forward ❌
    • 4 changes worked perfectly ✅
    • Your Change Failure Rate = 1 ÷ 5 × 100 = 20%
  • Week 2: You made 10 changes

    • 1 change made the robot’s color weird ❌
    • 9 changes worked perfectly ✅
    • Your Change Failure Rate = 1 ÷ 10 × 100 = 10%

🎉 Great News!

Your Change Failure Rate went DOWN from 20% to 10%! That means you’re getting better at making changes without breaking things!


🏆 Why Does This Matter?

Think of it like this:

  • Your school art class: If you keep making mistakes when drawing, your teacher might say you need more practice. 📚
  • Your toy building: If your LEGO buildings keep falling down, you need to be more careful.
  • Developer apps: If a developer keeps breaking things when they update their app, they should be more careful too!

A low Change Failure Rate = Less broken stuff = Happy users! 😊


💡 Tips to Keep Your Change Failure Rate LOW

  1. Be Careful 🧐

    • Think before you make changes!
    • Ask yourself: “Will this break anything?”
  2. Test Everything 🧪

    • Just like you test if your LEGO tower is strong before showing your friends
    • Developers test their changes before everyone uses them!
  3. Make Small Changes 📝

    • Don’t change everything at once
    • One change at a time is safer!
  4. Have Friends Help 👥

    • Ask someone to check your work
    • Two eyes are better than one!
  5. Learn from Mistakes 🎓

    • When something breaks, figure out why
    • Then don’t do it again!

🎨 Fun Activity: Your Own Change Failure Rate!

Try this with your toys or LEGO:

  1. Count how many toys you fix or change this week
  2. Count how many of those fixes broke something else
  3. Calculate your own Change Failure Rate!

For example: - You fixed 8 toys this week - 2 of those fixes made other problems - Your Change Failure Rate = 2 ÷ 8 × 100 = 25%


For Parents & Teachers:

For Learning More About Software Development:

Interactive Learning:

Books Recommendations:

  • “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim (For older kids & adults)
  • “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim (For understanding DevOps concepts)
  • “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble & David Farley (Technical but comprehensive)

Tools to Measure DORA Metrics:


🎉 Conclusion

The Change Failure Rate is just a way to measure: “How many times do our changes break things?”

  • Low percentage = Good! 🎉 (Not many broken things)
  • High percentage = Needs improvement! 🔧 (Too many broken things)

Just like you want to build perfect LEGO creations, developers want to make perfect changes to their apps and games! The Change Failure Rate helps them know if they’re doing a good job.

Remember: Everyone makes mistakes! The important thing is to learn from them and keep getting better! 🚀

Ready to Improve Your DevOps Performance?

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