A squad is Parcel Perform’s equivalent of an Agile team. The squad leadership is shared between a Product Lead (what we are building), a Tech Lead (how we are building it), and a Project Lead (when). As squads are independent from each other to perform their functions, over time a squad develops its own set of technologies and practices. To avoid knowledge silos, the horizontal level of the squad models forms chapters. A chapter consists of individuals from different squads that share the same function.

Our work starts with stories on Pivotal Tracker. Then the Project Manager prioritizes stories in Backlog. In an IPM, the team discusses each story to gain a shared understanding, adds extra information as needed, and collectively estimates each story. A developer clicks Start and becomes a story owner. When coding and testing activities for the story have been completed, and the automated tests for it have all passed, the developer clicks the Finish button and the QA team will start their work in testing this story. After the CI build for the newly committed code has passed, the code is deployed to appropriate test environments, and stories are marked as delivered by a QA member. And lastly, the PM/PO, possibly in collaboration with testers and other team members, verifies whether acceptance criteria have been met, and accepts or rejects the story, completing the feedback loop.