Releasing Quality Software

‍

What Quality Means at Layer Systems

At Layer Systems, quality is about whether The Layer works reliably for customers in real-world, day-to-day use, not whether a release ticked a box.

We operate a cloud-based platform that customers depend on for operational and commercial workflows. Because of that, quality is treated as an ongoing engineering and operational responsibility, not a final approval step at the end of development.

How We Build for Quality

Quality starts at design time and continues through build, release, and support.

In practice, this includes:

• Automated end-to-end testing
  We maintain automated E2E test suites that cover critical user journeys and core workflows. These tests are run regularly and as part of release activity to reduce the risk of regressions.
  
• Dedicated test capability
  We invest in dedicated test resources, tooling, and environments to improve test coverage and consistency over time, rather than relying solely on ad-hoc or manual testing.
• Controlled releases
  Changes are released in a controlled manner, with an emphasis on minimising disruption and catching issues early.

Operating the Platform

Quality doesn’t stop once code is live.

We actively monitor the health and performance of the platform, including:

• Application availability and response times
• Background jobs and scheduled processes
• Key infrastructure components

This allows us to detect issues quickly and respond before they escalate.

Where issues do occur, we prioritise restoring service and understanding the underlying cause so that improvements can be made to prevent recurrence.

Learning from Issues

Defects, incidents, and near-misses are treated as inputs into improvement.

We:

• Track and fix defects rather than working around them
• Review incidents to understand root causes
• Feed lessons learned back into design, testing, and operational practices

This approach helps improve the platform over time rather than masking problems.

Security, Data, and Quality

Protecting customer data is treated as a core aspect of quality.

Our quality practices align closely with our security, data handling, backup, and incident management processes to ensure the platform is not only functional, but also safe and recoverable.

Responsibility for Quality

Quality at Layer Systems is owned collectively, with clear accountability within engineering and operations.

Everyone involved in building or running the platform is expected to:

• Take responsibility for the quality of their work
• Raise risks or concerns early
• Contribute to improving how the platform is built and operated

Review

This policy is reviewed periodically and updated as our platform, tooling, and practices evolve.

‍