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    Could you clarify what kind of "maze-like dependencies linking various artifacts" these are? Are they build dependencies, that could be resolved with a build tool like Maven? Are they input dependencies, where one of these artefacts depends on some input that is not obvious or clear? Are they key dependencies between database tables? Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 15:55
  • The system is PLSQL, Unix bash, OWB etc so there are all sorts of dependencies. Sometimes data is required of a certain format, in a certain place, at a certain time, by a certain module, but it's not remotely obvious from the code and can only be discerned in two ways: by going through the a mountain of code, taking perhaps days, to find out that some data had a delimiting semi colon in a part of the system that you didn't even know was being referenced since it was buried in 10 layers of recursively called code, or by asking someone, all the time, every time. It doesn't promote independence. Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 16:26
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    Literally all of them Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 21:32
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    Little tangent: Because Haskell is lazy, you effectively do not specify the order of operations when you write code. You only specify dependencies. Function C depends on the results of functions A and B. So A and B have to be run before C, but it could work equally well if A is run first, or if B is run first. I just thought that was interesting. Commented Jan 23, 2017 at 16:20
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    There is a book called Design patterns (the book sucks, but most of what it says is good, except the bit about singleton). It has several sections on managing dependencies. Commented Jan 23, 2017 at 22:46