testing, refactoring, code organization, consistent code styling for easy search-replace, and other best practice norms will save you months of effort in tracking down bugs, fixing new ones you introduced while scrambling around researching, figuring out what's going on when you have an idea that uses code you wrote six months ago, etc. Sure, maybe a tutorial and documentation might not be worth the effort for something that hasn't produced results (does publishable research still count as not having produced results?), but most industry best practices I can think of will save you much more than the time invested even on relatively modest (< 1 month) projects.