I was looking at the WPF MVVM framework Caliburn.Micro and read that a lot of standard things are based on naming conventions. For example, automatic binding of properties in the View to properties in the ViewModel. Although this seems to be convenient (removes some boilerplate code), my first instinct reaction is that it isn't completely obvious to a new programmer that will read this code. In other words, the functionality of the application is not completely explained by its own code, but also by the documentation of the framework. EDIT: So this approach is called convention over configuration. Since I could not find any questions concerning this, I altered my question: My question is: Is convention over configuration a correct way of simplifying things, or is it violating some programming principles (and if so, which ones)?