The change happened here. The regression appeared somewhere else.

A service change breaks a customer flow owned by another team.

The changed service still works the customer flow does not

The failure appears outside the component and team that made the change.

The changed service

The pricing rule still works.

Another team sees

Checkout now calculates the wrong total.

The failure crosses a boundary

The service returns a valid response. The frontend turns it into the wrong customer outcome.

Illustrative blast radius showing one provider change reaching checkout, refunds and invoicing flows
One change reaches connected flows
Illustrative trace linking a regression decision to its pull request, commit, author, timestamp and analysis run
Failure here source change there

The source is somewhere else

The visible failure and its source can belong to different components, repositories or teams.

Common patterns

Where regressions cross boundaries

01

Service dependencies

A contract changes and a dependent component interprets it differently.

02

Multi-step workflows

A local change alters a later step in the customer journey.

03

Team ownership

The regression appears in a system owned by another team.

04

Data contracts

A field keeps the same type but changes meaning for a connected component.

Run Early Regression Guard on your release candidate

Trace the impact. Decide what to fix.