Oliver Davies, a seasoned PHP Developer and Linux Systems Administrator, has shared a blog post detailing his experience in maintaining a widely used Drupal module currently active on an impressive 34,981 websites. The module's popularity and widespread adoption come with the responsibility of ensuring its stability and avoiding any potential disruptions for the thousands of websites relying on it.

While the module is considered feature complete, Oliver Davies remains open to the possibility of adding new features while prioritizing website stability. One of the key strategies he employs to achieve this balance is relying on the module's automated test suite. By diligently adding tests for new features or bug fixes and ensuring that they pass before each release, Oliver ensures that any changes do not adversely affect the functionality of the 35,000 websites.

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In a recent collaborative effort, Oliver and a colleague refactored the module by dividing each override into its own class. This restructuring improved the codebase and made adding and maintaining overrides more manageable. The automated tests played a vital role in this process, assuring that the refactoring did not introduce regressions or unintended consequences.

Oliver emphasizes the importance of having an extensive test suite and credits it with granting him the confidence to add new features and refactor code, even in a module used on such a large scale. The presence of automated tests has become invaluable to him as he navigates the fine line between innovation and maintaining the module's stability for thousands of website administrators worldwide.