Agricultural Bank of China's DevOps Journey: Building an Integrated Development System

Strategic Leadership, Unified DevOps Capability Building

In the 14th Five-Year Plan, China emphasizes accelerating digital development and building a digital China, urging the financial sector to adopt fintech responsibly. In response, Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) started a full‑scale digital transformation in 2019, forming a DevOps‑based closed‑loop management system that integrates CMMI for development, TMMi for testing, ITIL for operations, and DevOps for innovation.

ABC's R&D Center established a dedicated DevOps construction office, coordinated multiple departments, and introduced a systematic engineering governance mechanism to ensure tasks are tracked, reviewed, and delivered without omission.

Five Key Streams for Continuous Delivery

Process‑driven: End‑to‑end value‑oriented workflow that standardizes the entire development lifecycle, embedding automated testing, code quality checks, security scanning, and operational monitoring.

Tool integration: Consolidated toolchain that connects development, testing, and operations tools, supporting multiple architectures and enabling automated CI/CD pipelines; includes the internally developed “TianGong” collaborative platform.

Data visualization: Automatic collection of delivery metrics across demand, build, test, deployment, and environment management, displayed in the “TianJi” reporting center for decision‑making.

Standardization: Adoption of DevOps standards, localized engineering guidelines, work manuals, skill maps, and best‑practice solutions covering both agile and stable modes.

Culture & talent: A “people‑first” culture fostering DevOps coaches, rapid‑delivery teams, and continuous skill development.

Top‑Level Design, Building an Integrated Development System

Based on DevOps outcomes, ABC refined a panoramic view of R&D, merging CMMI, DevOps, and TMMi practices into a unified system that supports both agile (敏态) and stable (稳态) development modes. The system includes:

A complete end‑to‑end implementation process map.

Support for both agile and stable project types through configurable pipelines, quality gates, and release frequencies.

Four capability models (system, project, team, talent) derived from DevOps maturity standards, enabling continuous assessment and improvement.

Four solution packages that embed branch models, tool automation, engineering standards, manuals, best‑practice sharing, and training courses.

System Application and Value Delivery Effectiveness

The integrated development system has entered large‑scale deployment: central bank systems are fully rolled out, while branch systems are piloted, enhancing organizational IT efficiency and accelerating market delivery.

Scope deepening: pipelines now support multiple technology stacks and cloud‑native architectures.

Quality built‑in: automated code reviews, compliance checks, unit tests, security scans, and automated testing shift quality control from post‑mortem to real‑time.

Team collaboration: transparent information flow reduces communication overhead and improves efficiency.

Continuous delivery gains: average delivery cycle shortened to eight days; projects achieve daily deployment capability and pass third‑level external assessments.

Coach development: multi‑level DevOps coach teams provide targeted guidance, raising overall capability.

Empowerment mechanism: customized two‑month coaching cycles deliver end‑to‑end DevOps capability assessments and improvements.

Advancing to XOps: Expanding Beyond DevOps

With rapid digital productivity growth, enterprises are evolving toward XOps, encompassing DevOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, DataOps, BizDevOps, etc. ABC actively participates in standard formulation, completing 11 standard certifications, and will continue to extend standards, strengthen tool platforms, and promote seamless DevOps adoption across the organization.

"The journey is long, but we will persist in delivering precise value, agile processes, and simple tools to support high‑quality financial services."