Towards a System Requirements Specification Template that Minimizes Combinatorial Effects

This paper introduces the problem of combinatorial effects based on the evidence of many dependencies that explicitly or implicitly exist among the elements commonly used on system requirements specification (SRS). We start from the analysis and comparison of three popular SRS templates (namely IEEE 830-1998, RUP and with all templates), mainly from the perspective of the constructs and models involved. Then we propose and discuss a set of practical recommendations to help defining a SRS template that may better prevent (to some extent) the referred problem.