How China’s Agricultural Bank Mastered DevOps: Five Project Insights

Standardization and tool empowerment are identified as key factors for technology companies' success. The DevOps standard and its continuous‑delivery pipeline platform dramatically improve software development efficiency, enabling faster and more flexible market responses.

GNSEC 2020 Summit Overview

The GNSEC 2020 Global New‑Generation Software Engineering Online Summit, organized by the Cloud Computing Open Industry Alliance, Efficient Operations Community, and DevOps Era Community, attracted over 3,000 online participants on June 19, 2020. The summit focused on defining next‑generation software engineering and facilitating exchange among experts, scholars, and practitioners.

DevOps Standard Evaluation Results

The summit announced the seventh batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery assessment results. Besides several banks and insurers, China Agricultural Bank (ABC) submitted five projects, all of which passed the third‑level assessment of the R&D‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model conducted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). Level 3 represents a leading domestic capability.

ABC’s Five Certified Projects

Credit Middle‑Office Project

Personal Online Banking Project

Distributed Application Interconnection Platform (AIR) Project

Value‑Added Tax Input Tax Management Project

Financial Mini‑Store Project

Interview with ABC R&D Leaders

Q: Please introduce yourself, your organization, and the five projects involved in the assessment.

A (Zhao Yundong): The Agricultural Bank R&D Center, a direct department of the head office, supports over 500 million customers across retail, corporate, investment banking, fund management, leasing, asset management, and insurance. It has more than 3,000 engineers across six sub‑centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Chengdu, and Xi’an.

The five projects cover Java and C# stacks, cloud‑on‑premise, middle‑office/front‑office, service‑side and mobile, and micro‑service architectures, addressing invoicing, mobile marketing, credit, personal online banking, and distributed interconnection. By building tools, processes, and standards, they achieved closed‑loop management from requirement to deployment.

Q: Why did you choose five projects instead of one for the assessment?

A (Zhao): Selecting multiple projects aligns with our goal of improving overall DevOps capability, covering mainstream technology stacks and preparing for large‑scale promotion. The personal online banking project, with over 180 k lines of C# code and daily transactions exceeding 80 million, demonstrates our ability to deliver rapid, high‑quality value.

Evaluating multiple projects also fosters mutual learning and strengthens organizational support, despite the increased coordination pressure.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the standardization process, and how were they overcome?

A (Zhao): Major challenges included cross‑department coordination (nearly 20 departments), tool‑chain localization, building a measurement system from scratch, breaking existing strict financial‑industry procedures, achieving consensus on standard requirements, and coping with COVID‑19 restrictions. Solutions involved frequent workshops, cross‑team collaboration, extensive research of industry best practices, and strong organizational backing.

For example, before the second mock assessment, the Distributed Interconnection team rapidly designed an automated pipeline for self‑developed components, overcoming differences between artifact and image repositories.

In the VAT Input Tax project, the team built a micro‑service architecture using Spring Cloud and created dedicated CI/CD pipelines for both front‑end and back‑end services, fully meeting the DevOps standard.

Q: How does the DevOps standard differ from other IT standards such as CMMI or TMMI?

A (Liu): DevOps focuses on engineering capabilities and end‑to‑end automation of the delivery pipeline, whereas CMMI and TMMI emphasize organizational process management. DevOps standardizes workflows, integrates tools, shares data, and visualizes metrics to enable rapid, high‑quality software delivery.

Q: What benefits have you gained, and what are your future plans for DevOps?

A (Liu): The assessment gave us a solid start, clarified goals, and highlighted areas for continuous improvement. Future plans include deepening DevOps adoption, localizing the framework, optimizing tools and processes, enhancing data visualization, and cultivating a dedicated DevOps talent pool to support digital transformation and fintech innovation.

Q: Which metrics best illustrate the improvements achieved through the assessment?

A: (The original article includes a dashboard image illustrating key metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery.)

Q: What is your outlook for the future of DevOps?

A (Liu): DevOps has evolved beyond mere R&D‑operations integration to cover the entire software value stream. Its core goal of fast, high‑quality delivery remains timeless, giving DevOps strong vitality and growth potential. We hope it will benefit more enterprises and drive widespread digitalization.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The world’s first DevOps standard, the R&D‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model , was led by CAICT and co‑created with the Cloud Computing Open Industry Alliance, Efficient Operations Community, DevOps Era Community, Google, BATJ, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and industry experts.

The model has been officially listed by ITU‑T and the China Communications Standardization Association (CCSA). It evaluates agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, systems, and tools.

For further information, contact CAICT (Li Kailing, phone 156 5078 6171, email [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Dong Hui, phone 185 1511 5139, email [email protected]).