How Baoxin Software Achieved Industry-Leading DevOps Maturity: Insights from Their Assessment

At the GNSEC 2020 Global New Generation Software Engineering Online Summit, more than 3,000 participants gathered to discuss cutting‑edge software engineering practices. The summit announced the seventh batch of DevOps standard continuous delivery assessment results, highlighting Baoxin Software’s successful evaluation.

Interview Overview

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the project evaluated. Hu Bing, Deputy Director of Baoxin Software’s Industrial Internet Research Institute, explained that Baoxin Software, a listed enterprise controlled by China Baowu, focuses on integrating information technology with industrial manufacturing, offering cloud computing, big data, and intelligent equipment solutions. The evaluated project, the ePlat data collaboration operation platform, supports the Baowu smart steel ecosystem by enabling open sharing, collaborative connections, intelligent agility, and iterative innovation.

Q: How does it feel to achieve Level 3 in continuous delivery? Hu expressed pride that the team’s goals were realized, emphasizing that the certification not only validates their work but also deepens their understanding of the DevOps standard, leading to internalized practices and tool integration for future projects.

Q: Why did your company decide to join the DevOps standard assessment? He noted that their diverse enterprise applications required a standardized, automated approach. By building on open‑source foundations and a unified development framework (iPlat4j), they achieved standardization and further reinforced execution standards through automation.

Q: What benefits has the DevOps assessment brought to your organization? The assessment provided clear direction, clarified goals, and defined boundaries. It trained the team across configuration management, CI, environment management, testing, and metrics, fostering a deeper grasp of DevOps practices and enabling the creation of reusable processes and tools for broader adoption.

Q: Which metrics demonstrate the project’s improvement? Delivery frequency increased from one release every six months to an average of 4.87 releases per month per application. Automated interface test coverage reached 100%, unit‑test line coverage hit 85%, and automated deployment success rose to 97%.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the assessment and how were they resolved? Changing entrenched mindsets about DevOps required cultural shifts and time‑consuming adjustments, such as streamlining approval processes and establishing robust quality gates to enable rapid, safe releases.

Q: What are the next steps for DevOps implementation? Baoxin plans to deepen practice exploration, prioritize tool and process enhancements, and adapt the delivery model to support both agile and stable workloads, especially for multi‑deployment product scenarios.

Q: How do you view the future of DevOps? He believes DevOps’s broad, inclusive scope will continue to thrive, fostering ecosystem collaboration, best‑practice sharing, and a virtuous cycle of innovation.

ePlat Platform Overview

ePlat is a next‑generation ecological technology platform for smart services and governance, serving as the PaaS layer of the steel ecosystem. It adopts a front‑middle‑back architecture, emphasizes micro‑service design, and integrates interfaces, services, data, processes, and security to achieve platformization, middle‑platformization, and ecosystem‑ization.

The platform’s continuous release pipeline incorporates unit testing, Sonar static analysis, database rollback verification, API automation, manual testing, and business validation to ensure quality while accelerating delivery.

DevOps Standard Overview

The world’s first DevOps standard, the “Research‑Operation Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model,” was led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) together with industry partners such as Google, BATJ, Tsinghua University, and Nanjing University. The standard, now officially listed by ITU‑T and CCSA, evaluates agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, risk management, and tooling.