How FAW‑Volkswagen Earned Dual DevOps Certifications and Accelerated Digital Transformation

On May 29, 2024, China's Central Cyberspace Administration, State Administration for Market Regulation, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Information Standard Construction Action Plan (2024‑2027)" to promote the internationalization of IT standards, encouraging deep participation in ISO, IEC, ITU and other global standard bodies.

The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) launched a synchronized assessment based on the ITU DevOps international standard and the domestic DevOps standard, enabling mutual recognition of international and domestic standards and upgrading assessment scope, certificates, and reports.

On July 25, 2024, at the 3rd XOps Industry Innovation Development Forum in Beijing, CAICT announced the dual‑certificate results for FAW‑Volkswagen.

FAW‑Volkswagen evaluated two projects: the R&D Efficiency Platform and the Integrated Operations Platform . Both projects passed the ITU DevOps international standard assessment and the domestic system‑and‑tool standard at the excellent level, demonstrating that the company's capabilities are among the domestic leaders.

Assessment Unit: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

FAW‑Volkswagen has completed four CAICT DevOps standard assessments, including two continuous delivery assessments and two system‑and‑tool assessments.

Q&A

Introduce your company and the evaluated projects.

FAW‑Volkswagen is a joint venture of FAW Group, Volkswagen AG, Audi and Volkswagen (China), producing over 30 models under the Audi, Volkswagen and Jetta brands, ranking among the top Chinese passenger‑car manufacturers. The R&D Efficiency Platform is an internally developed toolchain that supports the entire lifecycle from demand to release, offering services such as demand management, code entry, build, test, artifact management and application delivery. The Integrated Operations Platform is the core operations toolset covering ITSM, CMDB, basic monitoring and automated jobs, enabling process‑driven configuration, monitoring and automation for digital transformation of operations.

How does passing the system‑and‑tool standard feel?

We thank CAICT for recognizing our system and tool capabilities and for their support during the assessment. Their scientific evaluation and professional improvement suggestions helped us achieve excellent‑level assessments for both platforms.

Why is an end‑to‑end, integrated toolchain important for DevOps?

In a highly competitive market, rapid feature rollout and continuous iteration are critical. Our platforms standardize the toolchain, enable one‑stop experiences, and allow low‑cost replication across IT systems, improving overall delivery speed and quality while ensuring security and compliance.

What considerations led your company to participate in the assessment?

Amid the automotive industry's "new four" transformation, we have pursued digitalization since 2021. Recognizing the importance of standards, we joined the assessment to use evaluation as a catalyst for learning, practice, construction and improvement, thereby strengthening our foundational tool platforms for digital transformation.

What changes did the assessment bring to your teams?

The assessment helped us refine organization‑wide IT service and tool capabilities. The R&D Efficiency Platform now links demand, development, testing, build and release, while providing automated metric collection, unified dashboards and visualizations for continuous delivery. The Integrated Operations Platform has shifted from manual to automated operations, fundamentally changing our operational mindset.

What challenges did you face during the system‑and‑tool assessment and how were they solved?

Early on, the large number of complex functions made it difficult to identify problems quickly. Weekly reviews of assessment criteria and task tracking clarified core tasks, and iterative technical solutions and continuous optimization enabled us to meet the assessment requirements.

What are your next steps for DevOps?

We aim to achieve an excellent‑level assessment for the overall continuous delivery domain this year, standardizing processes and strengthening platform capabilities to scale organization‑wide delivery. For the technical operations domain, we plan to assess basic monitoring and configuration management of the Integrated Operations Platform in the second half of the year, and to unify performance and log monitoring.

How do you see the future development of DevOps?

DevOps integrates development and operations, emphasizing collaboration. Its evolution will accelerate digital transformation, enable rapid response to market demands, and expand into operations and business sides. Emerging areas such as platform engineering, FinOps, BizDevOps, observability and SRE will shape our future practice.

Assessment photos:

Statistics of automotive enterprises that have passed the domestic DevOps standard (as of July 2024) are shown below.

For more information on the ITU DevOps international standard, see the linked article.

ITU DevOps international standard was initiated in July 2018 at the ITU‑T conference in Geneva, with participation from over 90 representatives from more than 20 countries.

The domestic DevOps standard "R&D‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" was jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Alliance, high‑efficiency operations community, BATJ and leading internet, finance and telecom enterprises, and has been adopted by many major companies.

The standard was formally concluded by the United Nations‑affiliated ITU‑T in July 2020 (standard number ITU‑T Y.3525) and covers processes such as agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, security, system and tool, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering.