convention-over-configuration

Convention over configuration is a software design paradigm that establishes consistent project conventions and default patterns to minimize environment-specific configuration chaos across teams and frameworks.

To reduce configuration chaos, document your project conventions in a central guide and apply standard framework layouts and naming patterns to ensure uniformity across modules and environments.

The best way to organize code for predictable projects is following framework conventions for file layout and naming, defaulting to sensible patterns, and treating configuration as code to enforce uniformity.

You need to document project conventions early in the development lifecycle to provide a single source of truth for team naming patterns, file layouts, and environment defaults before ad-hoc decisions cause configuration chaos.

Yes, you can apply framework conventions to existing codebases by documenting standard layouts and naming patterns in a central guide, then progressively enforcing these defaults to treat configuration as code across modules.

Minimizing environment-specific config makes projects predictable because it removes ad-hoc decisions, forcing modules to follow documented framework conventions and central naming patterns rather than relying on custom configuration setups.