How China Agricultural Bank’s ARROW Platform Mastered DevOps Continuous Delivery

On December 26, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

The Agricultural Bank of China had nine system modules evaluated, covering eleven items under the "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model".

Among them, the Full‑Text Search Service Platform (ARROW) passed the third‑level Continuous Delivery standard.

At the "2022 GOLF+IT New Governance Leadership Forum" on January 6, 2023, representatives from the China Communications Standardization Association and the Academy presented the award to the bank.

ARROW DevOps Continuous Delivery Construction

ARROW is the bank’s unified intelligent search service platform, providing a one‑stop enterprise‑level search for internal applications. It follows the bank’s DevOps engineering guidelines, using a unified toolchain and pipelines to enforce quality gates, enabling continuous integration and deployment for rapid product iteration.

The platform adopts an agile team focused on high‑quality delivery, quickly responding to search business needs and enhancing both service capability and continuous delivery.

Key Practices

Goal Setting : Align with the bank’s DevOps construction requirements, integrating management, development, testing, and operations tools into an automated, traceable pipeline.

Continuous Delivery : The pipeline covers the full product lifecycle, incorporating unit tests, code compliance checks, security scans, API automation, coverage analysis, and open‑source vulnerability scanning, improving product quality.

Improvement Drive : Metrics feed back into iteration, reducing code duplication by 92.8%, average cyclomatic complexity by 7.3%, maximum complexity by 42.3%, and backend rule violations by 90%.

Efficiency Enablement : Separation of application and configuration allows developers to focus on code, while a unified deployment tool enables one‑click releases, dramatically cutting deployment time.

DevOps Practice Insights

Adopting TDD, visual code review, and extensive automated testing boosts testing efficiency and product quality, ensuring high‑standard deliveries.

Conclusion

By adhering to the DevOps integration standards, ARROW has achieved high code quality, rapid iteration, and seamless end‑to‑end delivery, supporting the bank’s digital transformation and setting a benchmark for the financial industry.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology with contributions from major internet, finance, and telecom companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

It was also concluded as the world’s first DevOps international standard by ITU‑T in July 2020. The model covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, security, toolchains, business value management, and collaborative development.