Out Of The Tarpit, by Moseley and Marks
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
The first half of the paper is a spot-on critique of so many things that go wrong in the process of designing and implementing large-scale software systems. The second half, where the authors propose a solution, kind of goes off the rails a bit into impracticality... but they definitely point in a promising direction, even if nobody ever uses their concrete suggestions.
Project:M36 is an implementation of the proposed design from the "Out of the Tarpit" paper.