Change failure rate in Jira
Jira Cloud, failures and affected versions.
Change failure rate, which DORA now calls change fail rate, is the share of changes that cause a failure in production. Jira’s own reports have nothing for it. This page says how to get it by hand from bugs and releases, then how Changeline counts it.
What Jira does by itself
Jira has no change failure rate. What it keeps is the link between a bug and a
release: a bug’s Affects versions field names the version it was found in.
By hand, a JQL search such as
issuetype = Bug AND affectedVersion in releasedVersions() lists the bugs raised
against a released version. Group them by version, count the versions that have
at least one, and divide by the releases in the period. If a team links bugs to
work items instead of setting a version, the search is by the linked work items,
one release at a time.
What Changeline does
Changeline is our app. A release failed when a work item of a failure type points at it: its Affects versions names the release, or it links to a work item of that release, with any link type. Bug is a failure type by default, and so is every work type whose name contains Incident; a Jira admin can name others and add spaces to read failures from. The figure is the failed releases out of all releases: 12%, with 3 of 25 releases · was 8% under it, the figure before, and a lozenge for better or worse.
The Releases tab lists each release with the failures that point at it and its Rework: whether it ships a fix for a failure of an earlier release. The Failures tab lists each failure, its work type, the release it points at, the release that ships its fix, when it was created and its recovery time. For teams that count work items reaching Done instead of versions, a failure is a link to a deployed work item, from a work item created after it. Changeline only reads Jira and changes nothing in it.
A bug nobody linked to a release is not a failure to Changeline, so the figure is as true as the Affects versions are kept.
See Failures and recovery time and MTTR in Jira. Back to Changeline.
DORA here is the research programme at Google behind change fail rate and four other measures, not the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act. DORA is a trademark of Google LLC, and Changeline is not made or endorsed by Google.
