Same as it ever was

All the “little things” take their toll on the project schedule.

Productivity, even for small for teams, is a complex function involving resources and time. As teams learn and other concerns remain mostly constant, velocity should increase. The little things are very important but every decision is like a paper cut.

If you want your team to build fast, make sure they don’t get lost in the minutae. As we all know, naming things is a productivity killer. Anticipate the inevitable questions that arise from tools for which “there is more than one correct way to do it.” Document the decisions and move on. Try to not revisit them.

For example:

1. Should “is” be used consistently as a prefix for boolean values, functions that return them, and so on?
2. Should a concept be modeled as a datetime (with timeZone) instead of a boolean?
3. Can a data element be null? What does null mean in context?
4. For object-oriented languages, should data be accessed as a property or a function? foo or getFoo()? See also 1 above. These decisions are hard to change and can be a significant cause of aesthetic refactoring, so watch out for them!