Case Study: Praxis Engineering achieves monthly releases and higher-quality software with SmartBear Zephyr Enterprise

How Praxis Engineering Delivers Speed and Quality in a World of Complexity With Zephyr Enterprise

Praxis Engineering Technologies (a wholly‑owned subsidiary of General Dynamics) is a Maryland‑based, global provider of compliance, cybersecurity, and mission‑oriented solutions supporting defense and intelligence customers. On the Praxis Border Control program, Carolyn Jones, PMP and Testing Lead at Praxis (a 14‑year Praxis veteran), leads a six‑person test team supporting “some 25 or so developers” and faced a fragile QA state: a highly configurable web application (legacy Swing, next‑gen, and mobile versions), failed automation attempts, scattered Word/Excel test artifacts, and an initial overnight run of ~300 tests with ~110 failing—resulting in only one or two releases per year and six‑week regression cycles.

Praxis adopted SmartBear Zephyr Enterprise and incorporated Selenium WebDriver, Cucumber, TestComplete and the page object model to centralize test management and rebuild automation. After creating and refactoring the first 200 tests they now run 442 tests nightly; releases moved to monthly, regression testing dropped from six weeks to one week, test automation became trusted, documentation was centralized, and testers can focus on exploratory work while customers get faster fixes. Carolyn Jones also cites strong SmartBear partnership, and SmartBear’s tools are used by over 16 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 24,000 organizations.

Praxis Engineering

Carolyn Jones

Testing Lead