How China Agricultural Bank’s DevOps Team Won the 2020 Banking DevOps Team Award

2020 was a turbulent year for the global IT industry, yet under strong national anti‑epidemic policies and the rise of blockchain, AI, cloud computing, and big data, China’s IT sector continued to grow, prompting many enterprises to increase their digital investments.

The 2020 IT Technology Leadership Awards were created to recognize outstanding products, companies, and professionals, encouraging continuous innovation and inspiring IT talent to drive further industry progress.

On November 27, 2020, the award ceremony was held at the GOPS Global Operations Conference in Shanghai, where the China Agricultural Bank DevOps Construction Engineering Team received the 2020 Banking DevOps Team of the Year award.

Interview with Zhao Yun‑dong, Deputy General Manager of the Bank’s R&D Center

Q: How does it feel to win the award? Zhao expressed gratitude to the organizers and highlighted that the award validates the team’s year‑long efforts and motivates further promotion of DevOps across the bank. He credited strong leadership, the bank’s commitment to digital transformation, and the collaborative work of multiple departments for creating a localized DevOps ecosystem that supports a dual‑mode development system.

Q: Please introduce the team. The DevOps Construction Engineering Team was founded in April 2019, involving more than ten departments such as architecture, system support, information security, and various development and testing units. The team is organized into a overall group, a management‑chain optimization group, a pipeline construction group, and five pilot project groups, each responsible for tool integration, process standardization, data visualization, and pilot validation.

Q: What are the team’s key contributions? The team established:

A complete toolchain enabling end‑to‑end online development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and operational feedback.

A full‑process management chain that integrates development, testing, and operations, supporting both waterfall and agile models.

A unified metrics system that provides a single view of development data and drives continuous improvement.

A DevOps standard framework covering dual‑mode development, reducing onboarding time for new members.

Q: What challenges did you face and how were they overcome? Major challenges included remote collaboration during the pandemic, low integration among existing tools, and building a metrics system that balances enterprise‑level and project‑level data. The team mitigated communication costs through daily stand‑ups, integrated around 20 tools and 153 interfaces via a product repository, and iteratively refined the metrics platform to achieve visible, data‑driven improvements.

Q: What lessons on team collaboration and management can you share? Zhao emphasized the importance of strong team cohesion, clear goals, and robust management mechanisms such as daily reports and stand‑ups, which together maximized efficiency and enabled the team to pass the Level‑3 Continuous Delivery assessment despite tight timelines.

Q: What are the plans for 2021? The team aims to deepen DevOps practices, expand its scope, and build internal coaching capabilities. By internalizing, testing, and preserving best practices, they will continue to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation, improve IT productivity, and promote agile, integrated development‑operations workflows.