How Ningbo Bank Achieved Level 3 DevOps Continuous Delivery – A Success Story

Background

Industry data shows that standardization and tool empowerment are crucial for enterprise success. The DevOps standard and a continuous‑delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve software development efficiency, speed, flexibility, and core competitiveness.

2021 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum

On December 24, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) hosted the 2021 GOLF+ IT New Governance Leadership Forum, focusing on "Balanced Governance, Building a New Tech Governance Ecology" and "XOPS Innovation, Leading Operations Development". The forum featured speeches and experience sharing from academia, industry, and research.

DevOps Assessment Result

CAICT announced the 16th batch of DevOps standard continuous‑delivery assessment results. Ningbo Bank’s Scenario Payment System successfully passed the Level 3 assessment of the "Research‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model".

Interview with Chen Weihua

Q: Please introduce yourself and the project you evaluated. Chen Weihua, Deputy General Manager of the Financial Technology Department at Ningbo Bank, explained that the bank, as one of the first system‑important banks, has over 1,000 staff with nearly 700 developers. In 2020 the bank launched the "ISMART+" smart‑banking strategy, pursuing systematic, digital, and intelligent development.

The evaluated project, the Scenario Payment System, is a payment‑mid‑platform upgrade covering payment scenes, accounting, routing, settlement, management, and exchange.

Q: How did you decide to join the DevOps standard assessment? The CAICT‑led DevOps standard is vital for upgrading R&D‑operations capability and measuring software delivery quality. The bank started DevOps construction in 2020, focusing on platform building, talent empowerment, and agile transformation. The assessment was used to summarize, verify, and improve existing work.

Q: What benefits has the assessment brought? The assessment established a benchmark project, built a platform, cultivated engineering coaches, and defined engineering capability requirements. It also promoted cross‑department collaboration and created an integrated DevOps platform.

Q: What challenges did you face? Challenges included complex project governance processes, coarse‑grained requirements from a waterfall approach, and the need to adopt agile iteration, multi‑level meetings, and visual progress tracking.

Q: What are the key improvements? Engineering capability improvements are illustrated in the accompanying diagram (see image). The bank plans to disseminate best practices, expand DevOps adoption, and establish a coaching mechanism.

Q: Future plans and outlook? The bank will codify engineering requirements and practices, conduct internal benchmarking, and promote DevOps across the organization through sharing sessions, exhibitions, and coach training. It views DevOps as a fundamental driver of digital transformation, expecting further integration with AIOps, ChatOps, security, and business domains.

Scenario Payment System Overview

The system upgrades the payment mid‑platform to improve service capability, separates UnionPay payment to slim the core, and accelerates batch transfers to enhance credit‑card settlement efficiency. It adopts a micro‑service architecture with over 12 new services and a 15‑person team.

Industry Participation Statistics

Data up to December 24 2021 shows the number of city‑commercial banks and major banks that have participated in the DevOps capability maturity model assessments, with details on the levels achieved for continuous delivery, technical operations, security, and tool evaluation.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and leading financial and telecom enterprises, is the most comprehensive and authoritative DevOps standard in China. It was officially concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The assessment framework covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security & risk management, and system & tool evaluation.