How China Merchants Securities Achieved Top‑Tier DevOps Maturity with the TianGong Platform

Background

Large enterprises have found that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and a pipeline platform can significantly improve quality, efficiency, and safety, enhancing market competitiveness.

Recent Evaluation

On December 26, 2022, the China Information Communication Research Institute announced the latest batch of DevOps standard assessment results. China Merchants Securities participated with its TianGong R&D Management Platform, which passed the “pipeline” and “build and continuous integration” modules at the Excellent level, indicating a leading domestic position.

By the end of 2022, the company had passed five CAICT DevOps standard assessments, including two continuous delivery, one technical operation, and two system‑and‑tool evaluations.

Interview

Q: Please introduce the project you evaluated. Deng Shuguang: Guided by our “1633” digital strategy, we built a one‑stop R&D management platform in 2021 that broke tool‑chain silos between business, development, and operations, and visualized process data through an organization‑level digital measurement system.

Deng Shuguang: The TianGong platform follows DevOps engineering and agile management practices, covering more than 15 sub‑domains such as project management, requirement management, code repository, continuous integration, code scanning, artifact management, test management, automated testing, version control, metrics, user management, software asset management, and a digital R&D portal. It provides full‑lifecycle management and serves as the core foundation for agile delivery and digital transformation.

Q: How do you feel about passing the DevOps standard assessment? Deng Shuguang: We are delighted that the platform achieved Excellent ratings in both “pipeline” and “build & continuous integration” modules. This validates our agile delivery capabilities and strengthens the foundation for a high‑quality, data‑driven digital product line.

Q: How important is an end‑to‑end, integrated toolchain for DevOps adoption? Deng Shuguang: It is the core foundation of DevOps practice, providing platform capabilities for development, testing, and release, reducing idle waiting time, and improving collaboration efficiency.

Q: What changes did the assessment bring to your team? Zeng Fanlin: The evaluation helped us enhance pipeline and CI capabilities, shorten feedback cycles, establish quality gates, standardize DevOps engineering practices, and support large‑scale DevOps promotion.

Q: What platform improvements resulted from the assessment? Zeng Fanlin: We added organization‑level and team‑level pipeline templates, improved pipeline standardization, reduced usage barriers, optimized build cache (doubling speed), refined permission systems, enriched metric dimensions, and introduced flexible scheduling strategies.

Q: What are the next steps for DevOps work? Zeng Fanlin: We will continue to enhance the TianGong platform, deepen method‑system integration, promote BizDevOps, build digital capabilities through data and technology, and shift from “support enablement” to “value enablement.”

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The “Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” series standards were led by the China Information Communication Research Institute with participation from top internet companies, financial and telecom enterprises. It is the first comprehensive DevOps series standard in China, recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading firms.

In July 2020, the DevOps standard became the world’s first DevOps international standard approved by the ITU‑T. The model covers process (agile management, continuous delivery, technical operation), application design, security and risk management, system and tools, business value management, collaborative development and operations, and continuous testing.

For inquiries about DevOps standard assessments, contact the China Information Communication Research Institute (Liu Kaili, phone 15650786171, email [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huanxin, phone 18500255645, email [email protected]).