Attempts to formalize the process of object oriented analysis and design have been made since the beginning of the OOP. A widely used approach is described in [1].
In object oriented design some common problems - or tasks - may appear in many different situations. Reusable solutions of these problems are called Design Patterns. A well known example of design pattern is Singleton - the class that may have at most one instance. Another example is Responsibility Chain; this design pattern solves the problem how to find the proper processing of varying data, even if the way of processing may dynamically change.
The idea of design patterns and the 23 most common design patterns in OOP are described in [3].