  Mission critical software is often required to comply with multiple
regulations, standards or policies. Recent paradigms, such as cloud computing,
also require software to operate in heterogeneous, highly distributed, and
changing environments. In these environments, compliance requirements can vary
at runtime and traditional compliance management techniques, which are normally
applied at design time, may no longer be sufficient. In this paper, we motivate
the need for adaptive compliance by illustrating possible compliance concerns
determined by runtime variability. We further motivate our work by means of a
cloud computing scenario, and present two main contributions. First, we propose
and justify a process to support adaptive compliance that ex- tends the
traditional compliance management lifecycle with the activities of the
Monitor-Analyse-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loop, and enacts adaptation through
re-configuration. Second, we explore the literature on software compliance and
classify existing work in terms of the activities and concerns of adaptive
compliance. In this way, we determine how the literature can support our
proposal and what are the open research challenges that need to be addressed in
order to fully support adaptive compliance.
