Here’s a good, quick read. It got its start about 10 years ago:

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html

Topics:

• Simplicity
• Modular Design
• Tolerance (”Be liberal in what you require but conservative in what you do”)
• Decentralization
• Test of Independent Invention (”If someone else had already invented your system, would theirs work with yours?”)
• Principle of Least Power

When you’re heads-down doing Agile or OOP sometimes you find yourself accidentally assuming that certain useful general principles are special to what you practice – when the truth is they’re probably not even unique to your discipline, and some Greeks wrote them down around 500 BC.