Practical Guidance for Soft‑Landing Agile Development: Case Studies and Basic Requirements

Background – Agile has become a buzzword in 2018, and many projects are transitioning from the entrenched waterfall model. The authors, from the Agricultural Bank of China Software Development Center, summarize practical, ground‑level experiences to help teams achieve a soft landing of agile.

Tailoring to Circumstances – Successful agile implementations share the trait of being "tailored to the environment". Practices such as Kanban, continuous integration, single trunk, test‑first, impact mapping, TDD, pair programming, Scrum, and story mapping are not universally optimal; teams must flexibly apply methods that suit their project realities.

Case examples illustrate this principle:

Project A integrated business personnel early, achieving seamless market‑to‑development flow.

Project B moved testing earlier with TDD, improving code testability and delivery speed.

Project C adopted Scrum across the team, fostering technical excellence, good design, and efficient communication.

Project D, a core system with stable requirements, continued using a traditional waterfall approach while borrowing agile tools like Kanban and stand‑ups for better collaboration.

Problem‑Driven Adoption – Agile is not a panacea; adoption should be driven by concrete problems. Teams should first identify whether issues are people‑related, technical, or process‑related, then decide whether to replace the whole process or selectively adopt agile practices.

Two further cases demonstrate this approach:

When a large project struggled with progress tracking and communication, the team introduced only Scrum’s Kanban board and daily stand‑ups, keeping other processes unchanged, which solved the immediate pain points with minimal learning cost.

For a team with mixed skill levels, the authors advise a mentorship model (senior guiding junior) and gradual iteration to build self‑organization and self‑management, emphasizing that agile is about responsiveness, not speed alone.

Basic Requirements – The authors list concrete steps to set up a practical agile runway:

Start with a simple physical Kanban board; aesthetics are secondary.

Use whiteboard paper, colored tape, and sticky notes.

Assign a dedicated person to maintain the board, focusing on visualizing value flow, displaying process rules, and limiting work‑in‑progress.

Continuously improve the board, questioning flow and content.

Establish a daily stand‑up routine with a clear schedule and incentives.

Make all requirements and rules visible.

Define three Scrum roles: Scrum Master (soft‑skill focused), Product Owner (strong technical and domain knowledge), and Team (design, implementation, management).

The article concludes that agile originates from many practices; teams should reach consensus on agile thinking, tailor strategies to their context, adopt problem‑driven entry points, and continuously refine processes through iteration retrospectives, embodying Scrum’s core principle of continuous improvement.