How Haitong Securities Boosted Efficiency with DevOps Standard Evaluation

Enterprise success increasingly depends on standardization and tool empowerment; the DevOps standard and a continuous delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve software development efficiency and competitiveness.

DevOps Standard Assessment

On September 9, 2021, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) released the 13th batch of DevOps standard continuous delivery assessment results. Haitong Securities participated with its e‑HaiTongCai Data Application Service System and passed the level‑3 evaluation of the "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model".

Interview with Wang Hongtao, General Manager of Haitong Securities Software Development Center

Wang introduced Haitong Securities as a leading Chinese securities firm with extensive platforms and a customer base of 17 million. The evaluated project, e‑HaiTongCai, is a comprehensive wealth‑management app providing market data, analysis, and trading services.

He expressed satisfaction with passing the level‑3 assessment, noting improvements in development process standardization, efficiency, quality control, and automation, which lay a solid foundation for organization‑wide promotion.

Haitong began building a standardized development‑testing framework in 2018, aligning with CMMI ML3 and creating the HOPE process. However, fragmented tools and dispersed quality controls limited end‑to‑end visibility, prompting adoption of the CAICT DevOps model to unify processes and tools.

The assessment helped foster a DevOps culture, integrate various development, testing, and operations tools into an enterprise‑wide continuous delivery platform, and solidify dozens of capability items into concrete standards.

Key outcomes include reducing release cycles from weekly to daily deployments, increasing release frequency from 1‑2 times per month to weekly, and maintaining a production defect escape rate of zero for three months.

Challenges involved lacking DevOps‑oriented roles, skill gaps, and fragmented toolchains. Haitong addressed these by training, creating DevOps engineer roles, and consolidating commercial, open‑source, and self‑developed tools, notably enhancing their automated testing and deployment platforms.

Future plans focus on expanding DevOps adoption across the organization, continuously optimizing the delivery platform, and customizing the standard for the securities‑futures industry, aiming toward DevSecOps and deeper open‑source governance.

DevOps Standard Overview

The "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" was jointly developed by CAICT, cloud computing alliances, major internet companies, and financial and telecom enterprises, becoming the first global DevOps standard recognized by the ITU‑T in July 2020. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, risk management, and tooling.