How Ningbo Bank Achieved Leading DevOps Maturity: An Inside Look

Domestic and international enterprises have shown that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and a standards‑based continuous‑delivery pipeline can significantly improve quality, efficiency, safety, and agility, boosting market competitiveness.

On October 28, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results. Ningbo Bank’s Financial Services System – Financing Center project passed the CAICT’s DevOps Capability Maturity Model Continuous Delivery Level 3 assessment, indicating a leading domestic capability.

Interview with Cheng Shuai, Deputy General Manager of the FinTech Department, Ningbo Bank

Project Overview

The Financing Center is a core subsystem of the Treasury Management System. The project focused on:

Refining user permissions to create an internal credit module, separating internal borrower and guarantor data.

Integrating with core and credit systems using the latest backend to reduce transaction failures and improve efficiency.

Adding a regulatory‑center financing query module for real‑time monitoring and lower management costs.

Optimizing transaction and query speed, simplifying processes, and enhancing user experience.

Assessment Impact

Passing Level 3 demonstrates that the bank’s DevOps capability is among the best in the country. The assessment validated the engineering platform, coach development, measurement feedback mechanisms, and set a benchmark for bank‑wide DevOps promotion.

Team members across product, testing, development, and operations reported deeper practice of fine‑grained requirement management, high‑quality code, efficient delivery, and closed‑loop feedback.

Quantitative Improvements

Key metrics after the assessment include:

Small‑scale demand effort reduced from 45 person‑days to 25 person‑days.

Integration response time dropped from 0.5 day to 1 hour.

Production frequency increased from twice a month to once a week.

Challenges and Solutions

Major challenges were multi‑platform coordination and coarse‑grained requirements. The teams addressed them by linking platforms through data sharing and API calls, and by repeatedly breaking down and refining requirements with product and testing collaboration.

Future Plans

The bank will codify DevOps engineering requirements into organizational rules, further optimize practices such as fine‑grained user stories, automated pipelines, timely feedback, measurement, and automated testing, and continue exploring emerging practices like AIOps and ChatOps.

DevOps Standards Overview

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series, led by CAICT with contributions from major internet, finance, and telecom companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been adopted by many leading enterprises. It covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, and system/tool evaluation. In July 2020, the standard was officially concluded by the ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard.