Change Failure Rate (CFR): Definition and Calculation

• CFR represents the percentage of deployments that cause production failures.
• Failures are identified using incidents from your project management tool.
• You can customize what qualifies as a production incident.
• CFR can be viewed at the organization or team level.

LinearB calculates CFR using the following formula:

• Numerator: Number of production incidents
• Denominator: Number of deployments

Production incidents are derived from issues in your connected project management system based on your configured incident rules.

By default, LinearB treats bugs with the highest priority as production incidents. You can customize this logic under:

Company Settings → Project Management → Incidents

You can define which issues count as production incidents using:

• Issue types
• Labels
• Specific field values

To configure this logic, open the CFR Rule Builder and add conditions that represent critical production failures.

By default, CFR timing starts when a production incident issue transitions to In Progress.

You can override this behavior by selecting a custom date field from your project management issue using the Incident Validation dropdown.

LinearB’s Incident API allows you to report production failures from any external system, even if it is not a native project management integration.

This is useful if incidents are tracked in custom tools or external platforms.

CFR can also be calculated at the team level. Team CFR is a roll-up of incidents attributed to contributors within each team.

To ensure incidents are attributed correctly, verify that each team is associated with the correct project management boards:

Team Settings → Projects