How China Postbank Achieved Top-Level Continuous Testing in DevOps

As the integration of research‑development and operations (DevOps) becomes widespread across industries, testing has emerged as a critical step for improving R&D operational quality. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s 14th‑Five‑Year plan emphasizes enhancing software quality management, monitoring, early warning, and evaluation, and calls for a complete testing certification system.

On December 15, 2023, the 2023 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum was held in Beijing, where the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps and AIOps standard assessment results.

China Postal Savings Bank (CPSB) entered two projects—the Enterprise Mobile Banking System and the Project Construction Funds Supervision System —into the evaluation. Both projects successfully passed the CAICT Continuous Testing (CT) Level 3 assessment, marking CPSB as one of the first state‑owned banks to achieve this domestic leading level.

Interview with Hu Junfeng, General Manager of CPSB Software R&D Center :

Hu introduced CPSB as a major state‑owned bank with nearly 40,000 outlets serving over 650 million personal customers, focusing on “three‑rural” services, urban‑rural residents, and SMEs. The bank leverages technology to drive business process reengineering and product innovation, implementing a SPEEDS strategy that includes DevOps, open‑source governance, and continuous testing.

The Enterprise Mobile Banking project offers corporate customers a mobile app with services such as credit inquiries, intelligent recommendation, personalized interfaces, live video, and digital‑human broadcasting, supporting digital transformation for enterprises.

The Project Construction Funds Supervision System, developed in‑house, provides end‑to‑end fund‑monitoring services for infrastructure projects like railways and highways, already deployed in several major rail lines.

Hu emphasized that continuous testing links requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, and operations, enabling standardization and automation across the lifecycle. CPSB’s internal platforms—such as the DevOps R&D Collaboration Platform and the “Xingchen” platform—enhance fine‑grained project management and accelerate value delivery.

Key outcomes from the assessment include a significant increase in automated regression coverage, a 99 % reduction in technical debt, and a shortened overall time from requirement to release, thereby improving testing service capability and overall development efficiency.

Challenges faced during the assessment involved limited reference cases, multi‑site coordination, and simultaneous delivery of core system testing and continuous‑testing improvements. CPSB addressed these by establishing dedicated task forces, holding daily and weekly coordination meetings, and leveraging the “Xingchen” platform for dual‑track support.

Looking ahead, CPSB plans to further integrate continuous‑testing standards into its internal processes, develop a bank‑specific DevTestOps specification, and expand the “Xingchen” platform to cover the full engineering lifecycle, promoting automation, standardization, and intelligent testing.

The article also includes several images illustrating the forum, assessment certificates, and statistical charts of DevOps maturity assessments among state‑owned banks.