How Anxin Securities Achieved Leading DevOps Maturity with Continuous Delivery

Editor’s Note: Standardization and tool empowerment are key to success for technology companies. The DevOps standard and a continuous‑delivery pipeline platform dramatically improve software development efficiency, enabling faster, more flexible market response and making IT a core competitive advantage.

On December 23, 2020, the 2020 GOLF+ IT Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing to promote IT governance and share industry experience. The event announced the tenth batch of DevOps capability maturity continuous‑delivery assessment results.

Assessment Result: Anxin Securities’ “User Center” project achieved a Level‑3 continuous‑delivery rating in the DevOps Capability Maturity Model conducted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). Level‑3 is considered a domestic leading standard, marking the project as the second Anxin Securities project to pass this evaluation.

Previously, the company’s mobile securities trading service platform also passed the Level‑3 assessment.

Interview with CIO Xu Yanbing:

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

A: I am Xu Yanbing, CIO and General Manager of the IT Center at Anxin Securities, a fully‑licensed comprehensive securities firm under the State Development Investment Group. Our IT Center supports over 6 million customers across trading, wealth management, and other services. The User Center project serves as an internet‑business middle‑platform, providing registration, login, account binding, information modification, and query functions for the Anxin e‑Account system, enabling a “one account, one login, one‑stop service” model.

Q: How does the Level‑3 continuous‑delivery assessment impact your team?

A: Passing Level‑3 validates our DevOps capabilities, confirms the success of our second project after the mobile trading platform, and reinforces our commitment to agile transformation.

Q: Why did you decide to join the DevOps standard assessment?

A: As our business grew, the IT team expanded beyond 800 members. The previous project‑based development model suffered from low transparency, fragmented tools, and manual testing. Joining the assessment helped us adopt a unified DevOps platform, improve automation, and drive an organization‑wide agile development system.

Q: What benefits has the assessment brought?

A: We have built an agile R&D management system covering organization, process, platform, metrics, and continuous improvement. In the User Center project, we integrated CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and data‑driven metrics, significantly shortening delivery cycles.

Q: Which metrics demonstrate the improvement?

A: Unit‑test coverage rose from 50 % to over 86 %; automated‑test ratio increased from 70 % to 92.34 %; pipeline execution time is now under 10 minutes; average delivery cycle shortened to 5.5 days, a dramatic improvement over the previous weeks‑long cycles.

Q: What challenges did you face during the assessment?

A: Early on, agile practices were insufficient, and the development process was fragmented across requirements, coding, testing, environment management, security checks, and deployment. We re‑engineered the end‑to‑end workflow, defined clear entry/exit criteria, and built a cross‑functional DevOps platform team to provide a unified toolchain and collaboration environment.

Q: What are your next steps?

A: We will continue expanding the DevOps platform to cover all self‑developed systems within two to three years, creating a unified developer portal for requirements, coding, testing, deployment, and resource management. Simultaneously, we will enrich our measurement platform with automated analysis and real‑time optimization suggestions, forming a closed‑loop of continuous improvement.

Q: How do you see the future of DevOps?

A: Originating from the internet era and agile practices, DevOps focuses on rapid value delivery and integration of development and operations. In the digital transformation of financial enterprises, IT will move from backstage to center stage, evolving into BizDevOps where business and IT collaborate closely.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model: The model, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, leading internet companies, and major financial and telecom enterprises, is the first domestic DevOps standard series. It was officially concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The assessment framework includes agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, and tool ecosystems.