How Chinese Banks and Securities Firms Achieved Top Agile DevOps Maturity Levels

In a fast‑changing market and technology landscape, agile development practices are essential for efficient product development and high‑quality delivery, as emphasized in the Central Bank’s FinTech development plan (2022‑2025). Agile focuses on close collaboration among business, product, development, and testing roles, adaptable team organization, iterative planning, continuous early delivery, and rapid response to change.

The Chinese Information and Communication Research Institute (CAICT) leads the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series of standards, which became an ITU‑T international standard (Y.3525) in July 2020. Since its first assessment in 2018, the model has been applied across more than 20 industries, with over a hundred enterprises evaluated by early 2024.

AgriBank Case Studies

Data Middle‑Platform Portal Project: This portal serves as the unified entry point for the Agricultural Bank’s next‑generation big‑data system, providing massive data processing, integrated data services, asset management, and rapid value conversion to support intelligent marketing, risk control, operations, and decision‑making. Built using a "use‑case‑driven, continuously evolving" approach, the portal now hosts over 1.4 × 10⁴ data assets, offering end‑to‑end services and enhancing user experience.

User Behavior Data Collection and Analysis Platform ("Firefly"): An in‑house platform that captures multi‑channel, multi‑dimensional user behavior across Android, iOS, H5, mini‑programs, and web applications, supporting real‑time, rich, and intelligent analysis of billions of daily data points.

Continuous improvement of measurement tools and platform support has halved the average requirement delivery cycle (from ~20 days to <10 days), reduced waiting times in development, testing, and business acceptance, cut defect‑fix time to under one day, and raised user satisfaction above 99%.

China Merchants Securities Case

Investment Banking Project Management System: As one of the first securities‑industry projects to pass the agile development management standard, it demonstrates enhanced value‑delivery management, agile process control, and agile organizational models. The assessment showed increased iteration capacity, shorter user‑story delivery cycles, and fewer defects, driven by priority‑based work allocation, WIP risk alerts, role‑switching development, and continuous integration and release.

ITU DevOps International Standard

In July 2020, the ITU‑T Study Group 13 (Future Networks & Cloud) approved the DevOps international standard Y.3525, titled "Cloud Computing – Requirements for Cloud Service Development and Operation Management," establishing a globally recognized framework for cloud service development and operations.

Domestic DevOps Standard Overview

The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial and telecom enterprises, provides authoritative guidance for DevOps implementation. The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, system and tool integration, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and system reliability.