Case Study: End-to-End DevOps Delivery Pipeline Implementation at Agricultural Bank of China

Continuous delivery pipelines are a crucial DevOps practice, yet many equate them with CI/CD; true pipelines span from requirement inception through architecture, planning, coding, building, testing, deployment, and user adoption.

The bank defines a "broad pipeline" (the full end‑to‑end flow) versus the industry‑standard "narrow pipeline" (traditional CI/CD), a methodology long guided by the Agricultural Bank's DevOps framework.

Phase 1 focused on the bank's three internet platforms (social, e‑commerce, financial services) and five product lines, with LEANSOFT providing Azure DevOps Server (formerly TFS) process control for over 3,000 developers, establishing a seven‑step workflow from project initiation to quality assurance.

Phase 2, the "Spring Project," deepened agile and DevOps adoption, building marketing tools across multiple channels, establishing an internal agile coaching system, and leveraging TFS for CI/CD, pull‑request reviews, and automated testing.

Phase 3 advanced bank‑wide DevOps transformation, consolidating tools onto TFS, creating a centralized build farm supporting Windows, Linux, and macOS across languages (Java, C#, JavaScript, Python, C/C++), and designing a DevOps metrics framework with 43 indicators covering delivery efficiency, quality, and capability.

The team introduced the "Software Delivery Efficiency Dashboard (Project Dolphin)" based on a DevOps data model, enabling extensible, plug‑in metric extraction and visualization, which supported the bank's successful Level‑3 DevOps continuous delivery assessment in June 2020.

Numerous reference articles and case studies illustrate the practical outcomes, including successful projects such as the credit‑center platform, personal online banking, distributed application interconnect platform, VAT management, and financial mini‑store, all demonstrating measurable improvements in delivery speed, quality, and agility.