XP 2017

Turkiye Finans IT in 2014 managed to be the first in Middle East and East Europe in terms of the size of the change by transforming all production and project teams and related processes to agile models from waterfall. The transformation included nearly 50 teams touching more than 200 people, and had to take place in a highly regulated environment driven by COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) regulations. Melting COBIT and Scrum in an organization is very possible, new, and challenging (especially when a full compliance is required as in this case). Despite the prominent challenges, the charm of being agile pushed the Bank to go for the transformation. Besides, it has yielded the first coexistence of these two in practice, to the best of our knowledge. During the transformation, we have witnessed some issues coming from the core of Scrum and COBIT and scaling Scrum while staying conformant to COBIT and maintaining the essence of Scrum. Thus, based on our experience, this paper aims to discuss such challenges and provide solutions for them from the practice.