How Agricultural Bank’s Financial Small Shop Accelerated Delivery with DevOps

1. DevOps – A Choice for Digital Transformation

Launched in February 2018, the “Financial Small Shop” attracted over ten thousand visits on its first day. The rapid growth of online marketing required a highly responsive delivery capability, combining the banking sector’s strict reliability standards with the need for fast, innovative iteration.

2. Advancing DevOps Practice – Pipelines

The R&D center introduced DevOps concepts and built comprehensive pipelines covering development, testing, security, and operations. Seven sub‑domains, 14 capability items, and 49 metrics were refined to fully exploit internal tools, resulting in pre‑build, development, test, and production pipelines.

The pipeline logic includes automated quality gates using tools such as ESLint, Parasoft, JUnit, CheckMarx, a self‑developed ATP interface, and UI testing tools, ensuring high‑quality code delivery.

Testing pipelines consist of a build pipeline and a deployment pipeline; the build pipeline automatically triggers the deployment pipeline upon completion.

The build pipeline automates the entire flow from pull request, code review, compilation, unit testing, code inspection, automated testing, quality gates, to artifact upload.

Jenkins pipelines, driven by SCM and SharedLibrary, handle compilation, packaging, image creation, YAML generation, environment deployment, and application health verification.

The deployment pipeline orchestrates artifact upload, test environment deployment, automated interface testing, manual testing, pre‑production deployment, and final production release after automated approvals.

The end‑to‑end process integrates project management (ITA), requirement tracking (TFS), feature branch development, mainline merging, artifact storage, automated testing, approval workflows, deployment, and metric feedback, linking management, development, testing, and operations chains.

3. DevOps Achievements

Delivery cycles shortened, improving business demand delivery efficiency by at least 19%. Container technology enabled multiple independent feature‑branch environments for parallel debugging and testing. Deployment time decreased by 60‑80%. Resource request time dropped from weeks to hours. Metric systems raised unit‑test coverage, reduced build‑fix time, and increased test automation rates, strengthening IT delivery and service assurance.

Beyond tools, DevOps fostered collaborative team spirit, driving continuous improvement and faster value delivery in the bank’s digital transformation journey.

DevOps Assessment Results

In June 2020, the Agricultural Bank’s projects were evaluated by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and achieved Level 3 maturity in the “Continuous Delivery” domain of the DevOps Capability Maturity Model, a nationally leading standard.

Credit Middle‑Office Project

Personal Online Banking Project

Distributed Application Interconnection Platform (AIR) Project

Value‑Added Tax Input Management Project

Financial Small Shop Project

Achieving Level 3 indicates that the bank’s continuous delivery capabilities are among the best in the country.