Rewriting the DORA Playbook: Proactive Strategies to Lower Change Failure Rates

In our previous article, we examined why the Change Failure Rate (CFR), despite its prevalence in DevOps reporting, provides only a partial view of software stability. By the time CFR rises, systems have already failed. Leading indicators, particularly code maintainability, offer a far earlier warning. But recognising this gap is only the beginning. The next step is strategic: how do software leaders turn maintainability into a proactive force for lowering CFR?

In this article, we move from diagnosis to action. Drawing on BlueOptima’s research and real-world usage across global enterprises, we outline key strategies and frameworks that can help reduce risk, increase deployment confidence, and reframe how DevOps metrics are used in practice.

From Metrics to Action: Why Maintainability Needs to Be Operationalised

Understanding that maintainability predicts CFR is important. Acting on it is transformative. Unlike CFR, which reflects outcomes, maintainability exposes the underlying conditions that lead to failure: poor modularity, high complexity, and entrenched design flaws.

To shift from reactive to proactive, organisations must stop treating maintainability as an internal code quality score and start using it as a strategic input. This means integrating maintainability insights directly into the delivery lifecycle, engineering KPIs, and technical planning.

Strategic Levers for Reducing CFR

1. Target the Source of Fragility, Not the Symptom

In organisations with high CFR, post-mortems often reveal a common pattern: fragile code left untouched for months is suddenly modified to meet a deadline. Without structural understanding or recent context, developers make well-intended changes that introduce regressions.

Maintainability metrics help avoid this scenario by identifying where risk resides long before failure occurs. For example, BlueOptima’s maintainability scores can pinpoint god classes or file-level complexity hotspots that accumulate silent risk. Proactively refactoring these areas has been shown to reduce the odds of change failure by over 90%.

2. Design for Deployability: Rework is Not a Cost, It’s a Capability

Rework is often seen as overhead. In reality, strategic rework is a capability that separates high-performing teams from firefighting ones. Frequent engagement with problematic code does not just reduce risk; it builds the context and confidence needed to ship safely.

BlueOptima’s data shows that repositories with regular rework in potentially high-risk files demonstrated significantly lower CFR than those where such files remained untouched. This suggests that the very act of interacting with and improving complex areas is protective. Smart teams embrace this, budgeting time for rework just as they do for feature delivery.

3. Track Maintainability Trends, Not Just Snapshots

A single maintainability score is useful. A trendline is powerful. Teams that track the trajectory of maintainability over time can anticipate instability before it spikes.

For instance, a stable maintainability score across sprints may signal safe ground for increased release frequency. Conversely, a steady decline, especially in systems with high release velocity, should trigger a red flag. It is here that CFR often rises next.

By combining maintainability trends with deployment patterns, leaders gain a true DevOps early warning system. Risk can then be signalled at the code level, rather than waiting for production incidents.

4. Make Maintainability a Sprint-Level Metric

Agile ceremonies traditionally focus on velocity and completion. Maintainability rarely makes the conversation. Yet codebase health is a direct input to the team’s ability to deliver without disruption.