Risks, Challenges and Issues in a Possible Scrum and COBIT Marriage

Today's turbulent business environment is compelling software development providers to face several challenges. As a response to this case, adoption of SCRUM methods is increasing. COBIT, on the other side, has domination in information technology (IT) and is a de-facto standard providing an IT governance model with international set of generally accepted IT control objectives. Considered the coverage of SCRUM and COBIT (version 4.1 in this case), a coexistence of them in a same organization has a possibility of emergence for organizations that want to use SCRUM in their COBIT environments. While a rationalized, engineering-based approach has dominated software development almost since its inception and has a co-occurrence and similarities with COBIT, melting COBIT and SCRUM in an organization is very new and can be an intriguing subject. This study holds the aim of shedding light on organizations by focusing on the identification of risks, challenges and issues of SCRUM implementation within a COBIT environment. This study works as a risk map for organizations that have opportunity to tailor COBIT. It also exhibits a list of challenges for organizations that must fully comply with COBIT framework.