How a Top Securities Firm Reached Elite DevOps Maturity with TianGong

Domestic and international large enterprises have found that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. DevOps standards and a pipeline platform can significantly improve quality and efficiency, enhancing competitiveness.

On December 26, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps standard assessment results.

China Merchants Securities participated with its TianGong R&D Management Platform, which passed the CAICT "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" system and tool standards for the "Pipeline" and "Build and Continuous Integration" modules at the Excellent level, indicating a leading domestic position.

To date, the company has passed five CAICT DevOps standard assessments in 2022, including two for continuous delivery, one for technical operation, and two for system and tool standards.

Evaluation unit: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

Interviews were conducted with Deng Shuguang, General Manager of the FinTech Center, and Zeng Fanlin, General Manager of the Technology Planning Department, to discuss their experience.

Q&A

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated.

Deng Shuguang: According to our "1633" digital strategy, R&D digitization is the foundation of digital transformation. By building an integrated DevOps R&D and operations system, we invest in digital talent, strengthen autonomous capabilities, and have established a one‑stop R&D management platform since 2021 that connects business, development, and operations tools, visualizing process data through an organizational metric system.

The TianGong platform follows DevOps engineering and agile management practices, covering project, requirement, collaboration, code repository, CI, code scanning, artifact management, testing, automation, versioning, metrics, user management, software asset management, and a digital R&D portal—over 15 sub‑domains—providing end‑to‑end lifecycle management and serving as the core of agile delivery.

Q: How do you feel about passing the DevOps standard assessment?

Deng Shuguang: We are delighted that the TianGong platform achieved Excellent ratings for both the Pipeline and Build & CI modules, confirming our agile delivery capabilities and the effectiveness of our DevOps digitization, laying a solid foundation for a high‑quality, data‑driven digital product line.

Q: How important is an end‑to‑end, integrated toolchain for DevOps implementation?

Deng Shuguang: Successful DevOps requires the integration of processes, methods, and tools. An end‑to‑end, integrated toolchain provides platform capabilities for development, testing, and release, reduces idle waiting, and improves collaboration efficiency, establishing a solid base for digital R&D management.

Q: What changes did the assessment bring to your team?

Zeng Fanlin: The assessment helped us enhance CI and pipeline capabilities, shorten feedback cycles, establish quality gates based on our R&D management policies, standardize engineering practices, and support large‑scale DevOps adoption.

Since the assessment, the platform has added about 30 improvements, including organization‑level pipeline templates, doubled build speed via cache optimization, refined permission systems, enriched metric indicators, and expanded scheduling strategies.

Q: What challenges did you face during the assessment and how were they solved?

Zeng Fanlin: The tight timeline required rapid gap analysis and tool upgrades, while integrating numerous upstream and downstream tools (collaboration, code, scanning, artifact, release, automated testing) presented technical difficulties. Through persistent teamwork, all issues were resolved, and the evaluation succeeded.

Q: What are the next steps for DevOps at your company?

Zeng Fanlin: We will continue to enhance the unified DevOps platform, align it with internal R&D demands, deepen method adoption, promote BizDevOps, and shift technology from support to value creation, leveraging data and technology to build digital labor and accelerate business value delivery.

The TianGong platform assessment site and screenshots illustrate the pipeline, execution results, and platform features.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by CAICT with contributions from the Cloud Computing Open Source Alliance, Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial, telecom, and internet companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps series standard in China, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading enterprises. It was also finalized by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard.

For assessment inquiries, contact CAICT (Liu Kaili) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huanxin).