Christopher Alexander, the architect whose work on architecture sparked the software Design Patterns philosophy/movement, also tackled this problem. He obviousl

Christopher Alexander, the architect whose work on architecture sparked the software Design Patterns philosophy/movement, also tackled this problem. He obviously didn't focus on software but rather approached this problem from the general design. His thoughts are in "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" (1964) and I believe his conclusions are similar to the authors of this article: split the design problem into "clusters" of decisions, so as to minimize the dependencies between "clusters".