Category: Sizzling News

Core banking modernization represents one of the most critical structural transformations a financial institution can undertake. However, upgrading the central transaction engine is only half the battle. Upstream modifications to schema architecture, field structures, and business logic effects across downstream data lakehouses, risk modules, and analytical engines.

During the strict cutover windows, data engineering teams are tasked with manually refactoring thousands of downstream data processing scripts and conducting exhaustive cross-system data reconciliations. Faced with severely compressed testing timelines, banks are often forced to streamline or shortcut verification steps—introducing hidden data discrepancies that threaten regulatory reporting, analytical accuracy, and operational stability.

To eliminate this downstream migration bottleneck, Sunline has introduced its Dual-Agent Collaborative Framework. Driven by a unified Single Source of Truth (SSOT) mapping specification, the multi-agent system automates script refactoring and data validation in a closed loop, accelerating end-to-end lakehouse modernization workflows by 80%.

Solving Cross-Engine Bottlenecks 

The framework pairs two specialized autonomous AI agents that operate off a single standardized rule repository, ensuring script conversion logic perfectly matches data validation criteria without human misinterpretation.

Quantifiable Operational Impact and Governance

By replacing manual downstream engineering tasks with AI-assisted automation, financial institutions achieve measurable delivery and governance benefits:

• 80% reduction in overall downstream migration effort: Compresses script refactoring from days to minutes, enables batch processing of hundreds of scripts within hours, and reduces single-table reconciliation from half a day to minutes—shortening overall lakehouse validation cycles from weeks to days.

• 100% Rule Coverage: Guarantees comprehensive rule application across complex horizontal, vertical, and row-expansion split patterns without omitting secondary field relationships or sub-tables.

• Unified Governance: Operating off a shared SSOT rule set, the rewriting and testing agents maintain strict consistency between code translation and validation, establishing a complete chain of auditability for regulatory compliance.

Core banking replacement creates significant operational risk if downstream analytical engines lose synchronization with the central ledger. By combining AI-driven script rewriting with intelligent data validation under a unified governance framework, Sunline's Dual-Agent Collaborative Framework provides financial institutions with a more controlled, efficient, and auditable approach to downstream data processing—helping reduce migration risk while accelerating core banking transformation.

Testing has always been an important step to ensure the quality of the software R&D process, but with traditional R&D model, there has been a lack of linkage between testing and the software life cycle. With the promotion and implementation of the DevOps model in the software industry, more frequent delivery further aggravates the industry's concerns about testing. Inefficient testing is often the primary reason for delays in delivery, and the testing process has become the biggest bottleneck for enterprises to transform into DevOps.

In order to solve such challenges, the concept of “continuous testing” was proposed and gradually became the inevitable pursuit of the industry. In DevOps, continuous testing provides a continuous feedback mechanism that acts as a catalyst throughout the product delivery pipeline, with automatic feedback at each stage ensuring that defects are addressed early in the development process.

This article will focus on sharing how Sunline's R&D collaborative management platform helps companies get feedback on software release business risks as soon as possible in the “continuous testing” stage of DevOps.

Building an integrated continuous testing platform with technology accumulation

As a carrier of DevOps practices in the testing field, continuous testing is a basic and continuous activity that should run through the entire software delivery cycle. Compared to the traditional testing mode that is prone to many issues in the DevOps era, the first thing that continuous testing needs to change is the “post-testing” situation. Emphasizing on pre-testing, continuous testing define tests as early as possible with parallel testing and development, maintaining close collaboration in the process to achieve quick feedback on business risk.

Focusing on the ultimate goal of “improving efficiency through continuous testing”, MOne Test, an integrated continuous testing platform created by Sunline’s MOne product team, helps the R&D team take testing as a basic activity throughout the entire software delivery process with powerful test management functions. In the process, the software delivery cycle is greatly shortened, testing and R&D are synchronized and iterated, continuous testing is realized, and high-quality delivery is achieved through:

·       Full life cycle covering different stages from test planning, test execution to test report analysis.

·      Rich team collaboration supporting testing teams of different sizes, and provides all the functions to meet the needs of team collaboration and process automation.

·       Continuous testing with the ability to integrate the testing process into continuous delivery and DevOps system, seamlessly connecting to defect management tools (JIRA, MOne Project) and continuous integration tools (Jenkins, MOne Pipeline), etc.

·      Integration covering test case management\review\execution, interface\WEB automation, fault drill, performance test (compatible with JMeter native jmx script) and other functions.

The practice of continuous testing within iterations in MOne Test

The testing process generally includes use case design, use case review, test execution, and test reporting. MOne Test integrates continuous testing platform to increase the collaboration and feedback between testing and other roles in the process, and opens up data interaction with the project management platform. The purpose is to help the team solidify practical experience through product capabilities, so as to achieve high efficiency within iterations test with:

Efficient organization and management of test cases to easily organize use cases in the tree-structured use case library, testers can flexibly reuse test cases to form use case reviews and test plans, greatly improving work efficiency.

Docking with mainstream project management platforms such as JIRA, MOne Project, etc., test cases can quickly associate requirements and defects, and in the process of test case execution, defects can be quickly created and synchronized to a third-party defect platform.

Rich online collaboration with multiple roles in the team allow multiple participations in the use case review and execution at the same time, the work status is synchronized real-time, cross-test redundancy is avoided and information is synchronized efficiently.

Efficient testing requires automation as the cornerstone

In the high-frequency delivery scenario of DevOps, how can the team improve the efficiency of test execution? The first thing that comes to our mind is automated testing as it is the basis of continuous testing. Only with a high degree of automation can it meet the high-frequency release requirements of continuous delivery.

Currently, most testing tools use open-source interface automation frameworks or open-source interface testing tools to automate interfaces, such as Postman and JMeter. However, this method has high maintenance costs and lacks the function of batch execution, which cannot meet the needs of rapid verification.

MOne Test is an integrated continuous testing platform, which fully refers to the page layout of open-source tools in design. It is easy to use, and supports batch execution, which can realize “zero code” interface automation.

Rich parameter transfers to meet the needs of data construction with the main types of parameters are as follows:

·       Parameter constructor to quickly generate data for testing, such as random numbers, timestamps, ID numbers, etc.

·       Public parameters put public data in the script into the public parameters for unified management, which is easy to maintain.

·      Step parameters allow quick reference of data returned by the previous step, and support referring to the data returned by different types of steps.

·      Transaction data show data reference across scripts to meet complex banking scenarios.

·      Project environment variables allow quick change to the script URL and public data by switching the project environment (test, SIT, UAT) when the script is executed so that the same script can cover different running environments.

Flexible scenario arrangement supports the combination of steps such as API, API template, database query (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL), JavaScript script, etc., to jointly complete the interface test of complex business scenarios.

Support batch execution visualizing the entire execution process of each API request i.e., request header, request body, response header, response body, assertion in the script execution step will be recorded. If the execution fails, the failure step will be prominently marked and the cause of the failure will be displayed.

Integration of automated testing capabilities into the DevOps system provide Jenkins plug-ins, which can directly schedule batch tasks on the test platform after API key authentication. Self-developed MOne Pipeline provides tool-specific operation steps to easily realize one-click automatic deployment and testing.

MOne Test helps the interface automation construction of a banking system

·       The automated scripts cover a total of 2,000 key transactions and develop nearly 3,400 automated test cases.

·     Batch tasks can be fully returned to the system every week and each time before going online, and the system can be fully expanded and executed concurrently in multiple environments.

·       Generate a fixed system start date through transactions, and restore data through scripts after each round of testing performed.

Through the construction of interface automation, the efficiency of the bank's testing can be greatly improved. Multiple scripts can be executed concurrently during task execution, thereby greatly shortening the regression cycle and reducing the risk of digitalization.

In the process of practicing continuous testing, enterprises not only need technical support, such as the basic capabilities of continuous development, continuous integration, and continuous deployment but they also need to pay attention to the precipitation of data, and continuously optimize behaviors based on data indicators, so as to realize the benefits of DevOps.

In the next article, we will share more on the practices in the “continuous deployment” phase, so stay tuned!

In the previous article, we mentioned that DevOps is a culture that values communication and collaboration between “software developers (Dev)” and “operations (Ops)”. The methodology used is different from the traditional waterfall model, spiral model and other concepts, its core is “agile” which results in automation.

More enterprises expect to achieve enhanced delivery efficiency through the introduction of DevOps model, in order to improve customer satisfaction and create more business value. But at the implementation level, how to successfully practice DevOps is still a difficult problem. The research and development collaborative management platform (MOne) independently developed by Sunline is a one-stop solution covering the whole process from requirements, design, development, construction, testing, release to deployment. Through the platform’s method of standard processes precipitation and agile practices, it forms effective empowerment at all stages of the development process via DevOps.

This article will focus on sharing how the Sunline R&D collaborative management platform helps the R&D team achieve a whole new level of digital collaboration in the “agile iteration” stage of DevOps.

The whole process of agile iteration

The implementation process of agile iteration includes: product team planning the goal → development needs dismantling, scheduling development → testing, testers perform iteration scheduling, development, testing → agile coaches track and feedback the iteration, in this process, the scientific division of resources and excellent collaboration between different teams in China are the keys to truly realizing “agile”.

·       Product team

As a bridge between the analysis of user needs and introduction of research and development needs, it is necessary to define the key features of the product according to the analysis of user scenarios, so that the product made is more relevant to the user.

·       Development team

As for product development, it is necessary to analyze and disassemble the research and development needs of the development team according to product characteristics to focus on the needs of solving pain points faced by users.

·       Testing team

The testing team serve as a quality component in the product development process, from use case management, automated testing and other means to ensure the products delivered to users can withstand different scenarios or tests.

·       Agile Coach

Agile coaches monitor the progress, identify possible risks and issues face during the process, and help the R&D team to continuously improve the efficiency during the agile SCRUM framework.

Agile iterative practice in different scenarios

Scenario 1: Identify user needs based on user scenarios

User scenario analysis is mainly provided to the product team for the deduction and analysis process. In the analysis process, there are two key pieces of information.

1.     User activities: According to the user’s operation and process, the user’s operation process is deduced step by step. We call this process the analysis of user activities. This process is mainly to identify the key scenario behaviors on the user side.

2.     Product capabilities: User activities need the characteristics of products (components) to support them. For example, the “click pipeline release” activity in user activities requires two products such as “dynamic orchestration pipeline” and “pipeline scheduling execution” of the MOne Pipeline component to support.

The user scenario analysis designer serves to carry the user’s scenario analysis process, and finally identify what capabilities of the products (components) are required.

Scenario 2: Focus on the key features of a product

The “capability map” is a form of expression of the product (component) key features from the perspective of the user. The input source of the product’s capability composed of the following two parts:

1.     The ability to identify product components after deducing user activities through “user scenarios”.

2.     Plan which product components the system has in advance, and the key capabilities of the corresponding components.

When all product capabilities are aggregated, a “capability map” of the product can be formed.

Through the “capability map”, we can better manage and track product capabilities.

Management of product capabilities based on R&D requirements: Product capabilities represent the output of product characteristics, and capabilities can only be released after the R&D tasks are decomposed and completed. Through the decomposition ability, we form a “to-do list” of R&D concern downwards, so as to realize the connection between product capabilities, and R&D needs. The research and development to-do items can be integrated into rounds of sprints through agile iterations. During the sprint process, the quarterly R&D requirements will be automatically fed back to the progress of product capabilities to achieve synchronous update of capability progress. Finally, when all R&D requirements under the capabilities are closed, it means the upper-level capability development is completed.

Tracking of product capability progress: You can understand the progress of each product component capability through the product progress tracking trend chart. The progress report of product capabilities will be summarized on a weekly basis to facilitate management to understand the development of the product.

Scenario 3: Collaborative mode for multiplayer development

The “user scenario” of scenario 1 mainly identifies product capabilities through user activities, and the “product capability map” of scenario 2 is to better manage and track product capabilities. The above two scenarios are mainly for product team. When broken down into R&D tasks through capabilities, a “to-do list” of R&D concerns is formed.

To-do item pool: By planning an iteration every 2 to 3 weeks, the to-do items are incorporated into the iteration for development.

Visualized iterative Kanban board: Through the visual Kanban board, it is more convenient for the team to align the progress of iterative tasks and predict risks.

Iterative Kanban board can be divided into different columns according to the process. When developers process tasks, they will move the task cards on the Kanban board to realize the state flow process. When all the cards are in one column, it means that the iteration tasks of this round are completed and the iteration can be closed.

In addition, on the Kanban cards, important and critical tasks can be marked and identified through the “label method”, and “deferred signs” are added to remind members to deal with them on time to avoid delays.

Scenario 4: Driven Development Mode of Feature Branch

The feature branch-driven development mode is mainly to speed up the process of software code development to testing deliverables. We perform offline code coding by checking out the code branch corresponding to the R&D requirements. After the code development is completed, if you want to quickly perform functional verification, you can initiate a merge application process, which will automatically trigger the branch release process in:

1.     CI construction pipeline, which performs source code construction, packaging, quality scanning and other processes, and uploads products to the corresponding product library.

2.     CD release pipeline which automatically trigger the product package to be pulled and deployed from the product library to realize deployment in different environments.

When deployed in different environments, it can be reviewed through development self-test, tester testing, and then to the pre-release environment of the product. After the development of the entire environment is completed, the branch code is automatically merged into the base (trunk) code.

The mode of feature branch development connects multiple roles such as development, testing, and product, which can more quickly break through the barriers of departmental collaboration and speed up the rapid software delivery process.

Through the above four scenarios, we describe the practice of Sunline’s concepts and methods in the “agile iteration” stage of DevOps. In the next article, we will focus on the practice of the “continuous testing” phase. Stay tuned!

In the wave of the digital age, the innovation and development of enterprises depend on whether they can quickly and frequently respond to the real-time user experiences and feedbacks. Those who stand out often have the ability to quickly and iteratively deliver products and respond flexibly to changes. As an extension to the agile concept to the field of operation and maintenance, DevOps provides solid support for enterprises to pursue innovate market responses in the process of digitalization, and is also the driving force for enterprise transformation.

DevOps reshapes R&D operation and maintenance system

The term DevOps comes from the combination of Development (development) and Operations (operations and maintenance), that is, the “integration of development and operations”. This concept emerged in Europe in 2009, due to the pain in operation and maintenance with the traditional model.

For a long time in the development of computer technology and software development industry, R&D, operations and maintenance have been in a clear relationship. From the perspective of R&D, delivering quality products with higher efficiency has always been the demand of R&D engineers while from the perspective of operations and maintenance, computer operations and maintenance technologies worldwide has been replacing manual operation and maintenance with machines and scripts.

The popularity of DevOps grew around 2015 when the IT market started to realize that it can reduce workload and improve work quality by connecting and integrating R&D with operations and maintenance.

Referring to the definitions of top global IT companies, DevOps is not a single technology or tool, or even just a process, it can be understood as a series of tool chains that can develop software at high speed and quality. This model not only improves the efficiency of software development but the performance of the final product has also become the embodiment and application of modern IT enterprises.

Today, with the advent of the digital and intelligent era, software is profoundly changing our way of life. How to quickly and continuously deliver high-quality software to meet the diverse needs of users, so as to reshape the core competitiveness, has become a practical problem that many enterprises must solve. Facing the competitive pressure brought by development and management, more enterprises are introducing DevOps to deal with more complex software development needs and environments and DevOps has been regarded as the key to the future development of enterprises.

Sunline’s exploration in DevOps culture

The essence of DevOps is a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools. Essentially, suitable tools can really improve the collaboration between development, IT operations teams and business teams, and a tool chain with higher integration and more complete ecosystem has become a major trend in this industry.

As a leading software service provider that has been deeply involved in financial technologies for many years, Sunline started the exploration of DevOps culture as early as 2015, and is committed to using self-developed products and various open-source tools to build its own DevOps tool chain and realize an integrated R&D standard system and platform construction. After long-term accumulation of experience in the field of DevOps, Sunline combines agile development methods to create a professional and standardized R&D tool “MOne Platform”, to meet the everchanging industry requirements.

The full name of “MOne Platform” is “R&D Collaborative Management Platform”, integrating the practical experience of R&D processes, implementation specifications, collaborative management and other aspects. MOne builds R&D practice into the platform to guide enterprises in the practice of DevOps. Through the process specification + tool mechanism, MOne supports the entire process from requirements, design, development, construction, testing, release to deployment, forming a closed loop R&D quality monitoring.

MOne has been entrusted with the mission to help teams develop, test and deploy code quickly and independently; deliver value to customers quickly, safely and reliably; as well as effectively improve the productivity of developers. MOne series of products have experienced many business scenarios enhancement, and based on a complete tool chain, it can provide a set of mature R&D efficiency solutions for customers in all walks of life, helping enterprises reduce the construction cost of R&D tools, improve product delivery efficiency, and achieve R&D upgrade efficiency.

Interested to know how MOne series of products achieve integrated R&D, as well as collaborative management in operations and maintenance? Stay tuned to the next few series of DevOps practices articles, and we will unveil them to you one by one.