How China Tower Boosted Software Delivery with DevOps Standards – A Success Story

Interview Overview

Enterprise practice and data show that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standard and a continuous‑delivery pipeline platform improve software development quality, speed, flexibility, and overall competitiveness.

Assessment Result

On 9 September 2021, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released the 13th batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery evaluation results. China Tower’s master‑data‑management module passed the level‑3 assessment of the DevOps Capability Maturity Model.

Interview with Xu Jingsi

Q: Please introduce the company and the project you evaluated.

China Tower was established in 2014 as a state‑owned telecom‑infrastructure service provider supporting the national network‑strengthening strategy and 5G new‑infrastructure. It builds, maintains and operates base‑station facilities, high‑speed rail and subway public‑network coverage, and provides information‑technology applications and energy services. The company has a headquarters in Beijing and 31 provincial subsidiaries.

The evaluated project is the master‑data‑management module of China Tower’s software system. It establishes a standardized data‑management framework for headquarters, governing data such as organizations, personnel, regions, suppliers, customers, and materials. Currently it exposes 115 interfaces, serves 46 internal systems, and stores about 30 GB of data.

Why Join the DevOps Assessment?

China Tower needed to accelerate digital transformation, improve software quality and efficiency, and address gaps between its development practices and industry standards. Standardized processes, unified tools, and a one‑stop development service were essential to support rapid, diversified growth and to own core technology and IP.

Challenges and Solutions

1. Building Consensus – Aligning all departments and external tool vendors required a dedicated pipeline team, weekly meetings, and clear risk‑management plans.

2. Unifying Business Processes – Previously isolated toolchains were integrated into a single pipeline, enabling data sharing and eliminating silos.

3. Supporting Complex Scenarios – The platform was designed to handle both common and customized workflows across headquarters and remote R&D centers.

4. Changing Development Habits – Training, supervision, and continuous monitoring helped teams adopt the new pipeline.

5. Reducing Technical Debt – Focused efforts raised unit‑test coverage to ~70 % and eliminated most legacy debt.

Benefits Achieved

The assessment helped China Tower create a fully managed, traceable, and measurable software production process, improve multi‑center management, standardize the development lifecycle, and free developers from repetitive tasks through automation, thereby raising quality and efficiency.

Future Plans

China Tower intends to migrate more business systems to the DevOps model, establish an internal software‑evaluation framework, and promote advanced development management across the organization.

DevOps Outlook

DevOps combines processes, culture, automation, lean thinking, feedback, and sharing. It drives high‑quality, rapid delivery, standardizes workflows, and enhances risk control, becoming essential for digital transformation.

Industry Participation Data

Charts show the number of telecom enterprises and projects that have participated in DevOps capability assessments, highlighting China Tower’s leading position.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, led by CAICT and co‑created with major internet, finance, and telecom companies, is the first domestic and international DevOps standard, officially released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and recognized by the ITU‑T in July 2020. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, operation, design, security, risk, and tool integration.

Contact Information

For DevOps standard assessment inquiries, contact CAICT (Liu Kailin) at 156 5078 6171 (WeChat) or [email protected]; or the Efficient Operations Community (Dong Hui) at 185 1511 5139 (WeChat) or [email protected].