Inside China Agricultural Bank’s Mobile Banking Success: Reaching Level‑3 DevOps Continuous Delivery

Editor’s note: From industry practice, standardization and tool empowerment are key for technology companies. DevOps standards and platform‑based continuous delivery pipelines dramatically boost software development efficiency and help IT become a core competitive advantage.

On 27 November 2020, the 15th GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shanghai, jointly organized by the Open Source Cloud Computing Alliance (OSCAR), GreatOPS and OOPSA. It is the largest domestic operations conference, gathering technical staff from internet, finance, telecom and other traditional industries to share advanced technology ideas and best practices.

The conference announced the ninth batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery assessment results. China Agricultural Bank’s mobile banking deposit‑loan module passed the Level‑3 assessment of the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" conducted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a domestic leading level.

Q&A

Q: Please introduce yourself, your organization, and the project evaluated.

A (Zhao Yundong): The Agricultural Bank R&D Center, a direct department of the head office, supports all branches and subsidiaries in retail, corporate, investment banking, fund management, leasing, asset management, insurance and other services for over 500 million customers. It has more than 4,000 developers across seven locations.

The mobile banking deposit‑loan module is one of the five core modules of the mobile bank, serving a user base of over 100 million with daily transactions exceeding 40 million. Rapid business changes and frequent releases required an end‑to‑end automated workflow, which DevOps provided, breaking silos and establishing a continuous‑delivery pipeline that greatly improved release frequency and quality.

Q: How does achieving Level‑3 continuous delivery feel?

A (Zhao): We are delighted. This is the sixth project to pass the assessment after five projects succeeded in June. By learning from other projects and refining our processes, we have markedly improved our continuous‑delivery capability and received expert recognition.

Q: What impact does the assessment have on the project team?

A (Zhao): The assessment gave the team clear standards, direction and goals. Repeated study and practice deepened our understanding of continuous delivery, highlighted gaps, and drove improvements in configuration management, CI, environment, testing and metrics, resulting in higher delivery quality and efficiency.

Q: Which metrics demonstrate the project’s improvement?

A (Zhao): Metrics such as requirement lead time, CI response time, defect density, build duration and release frequency were tracked and showed significant gains after adopting DevOps practices.

Q: What are the system’s distinctive features and the project’s outcomes?

A (Zhao): The system is large‑scale (over 100 million users, 40 million daily transactions) and built with modern technology: a Vue‑based front‑end, the in‑house Taihang back‑end framework, offline package mechanism with hot‑fix and automated deployment. Passing the assessment validates our mobile‑finance DevOps capability and serves as a benchmark for the bank.

Q: Was the assessment process smooth? What challenges were faced?

A (Liu): The assessment was challenging due to explosive business demand and concurrent framework migration. The team established robust communication mechanisms and re‑allocated staff to ensure smooth progress. We also pioneered integration of ATP, testing, and TFS for automated UI testing.

Q: What is the biggest gain from DevOps implementation in 2020?

A (Liu): We built a unified R&D tool platform, standardized activities, and established continuous‑delivery pipelines for six pilot projects, all achieving Level‑3 DevOps capability, laying a solid foundation for bank‑wide DevOps adoption.

Q: What are the plans for 2021?

A (Liu): We will continue to refine best practices, identify improvement points, and expand DevOps across more systems, strengthening internal coaching, accelerating lean operations, and supporting digital transformation and agile development.

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly developed by CAICT, OSCAR, GreatOPS, BATJ and other leading enterprises, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard, also recognized by the ITU‑T in July 2020.

The assessment framework covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operation, application design, security, risk management, systems and tools.

For assessment inquiries, contact CAICT (Li Kailing, 156 5078 6171, [email protected]) or GreatOPS (Dong Hui, 185 1511 5139, [email protected]).