How Bank of Communications Achieved Leading DevOps Maturity: A Detailed Case Study

Enterprise practices demonstrate that standardization and tooling are essential for success; the DevOps standard and a continuous delivery pipeline platform significantly improve software development quality, speed, flexibility, and core competitiveness.

On November 18, 2021, the GOPS Global Operations Conference, co‑hosted by GreatOPS, OOPSA and the DevOps Era Community, opened in Shanghai, aiming to share advanced technology ideas and best practices with internet and traditional industry operations professionals.

During the conference, Zhang Xueli, director of the East Branch of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), announced the 15th batch of DevOps standard continuous delivery assessment results. Bank of Communications (BoC) submitted two projects—the Smart HR project and the Cross‑border Finance project—and both passed the Level 3 continuous delivery assessment of the DevOps Capability Maturity Model.

Interview with Li Zhaoning, General Manager of BoC Financial Technology Department

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the projects you evaluated. Li Zhaoning explained that BoC, a century‑old state‑owned bank, has undergone several IT modernization phases since 2002, progressively enhancing technology empowerment. The bank leverages big data, cloud computing, AI, and blockchain for digital innovation, and the two evaluated projects are a cross‑border finance system (handling customs, aerospace, procurement data, anti‑money‑laundering, and financing) and a Smart HR system (providing AI‑driven, mobile‑enabled personnel, payroll, training, attendance, and performance management).

Q: How does it feel to achieve Level 3 in the DevOps standard assessment? Li expressed satisfaction, noting that the two projects became benchmark cases for BoC’s DevOps continuous delivery practice after 17 iterations over ten months, resolving 57 platform‑level and 113 project‑level issues.

Q: Why did BoC decide to join the DevOps standard assessment? BoC has closely followed industry trends, launching agile and DevOps initiatives in 2019, expanding DevOps platform usage to over 200 systems by 2020, and using the assessment to benchmark against industry best practices and validate transformation outcomes.

Q: What benefits has the DevOps assessment brought to BoC? The assessment confirmed the teams' high continuous delivery capability, clarified improvement goals, and led to standardized end‑to‑end pipelines, unified development‑testing‑operations platforms, embedded quality standards, and enhanced automation, thereby supporting digital transformation, faster business response, and higher IT efficiency.

Q: What concrete improvements resulted from the assessment? BoC established a comprehensive performance measurement system with 47 metrics covering requirement management, code quality, CI, build, testing, and deployment. Key outcomes include >90% automated build success, >5 daily builds, 100% interface test coverage, <1‑hour integration fix time, 5‑10 minute pipeline duration, and saving two person‑days per release batch.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the assessment? The main challenges were breaking down departmental silos and strengthening business‑technology integration. BoC addressed these by aligning goals at the executive level, forming joint workgroups, clarifying responsibilities, visualizing progress, and fostering close collaboration between business and technical teams.

Q: What is the biggest takeaway from this year’s DevOps implementation, and what are your next steps? The biggest gain is the noticeable improvement in software quality and development efficiency, enabling faster value delivery. Future plans include localizing the DevOps standard, expanding the tool platform, promoting broader adoption, and building an enterprise‑wide DevOps platform to support end‑to‑end visualization, cloud‑native standardization, and automated continuous delivery.

Q: How do you view the future of DevOps? Li highlighted emerging trends such as DevSecOps, ChatOps, AIOps, and AgileOps, emphasizing their relevance to financial digital transformation. He expects continued exploration and integration of best practices to further empower high‑quality business development.

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly developed by CAICT, industry leaders, and major internet companies, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard, recognized by the ITU‑T in July 2020. It covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, risk management, and tooling.