Private workplace suite: 105x faster testing, 3x shorter releases

Innowise transformed Carbonio’s release process by replacing manual practices with a meticulous automated framework. This enabled faster rollouts, greater stability, and long-term scalability.

98%

fewer production bugs

10x

faster deployment for client installations

Private digital workplace suite deployed on a personal computer

Industry Enterprise software

Employees 130

Region Italy

Services AQA, DevOps, backend development, ongoing support

Client since 2022

Client overview

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Zextras develops business software focused on secure communication and data management. Its flagship product, Carbonio, is a self-hosted digital workplace suite that integrates email, calendar, file storage, chat, conferencing, and office tools — running on desktop and mobile. With its secure, fully private model and modular architecture, Carbonio is trusted by organizations of all sizes that prioritize digital sovereignty without giving up scalability.

Challenge

With a mature toolset, multiple components, and a growing number of installations, Carbonio continued to expand, along with its partner ecosystem. To sustain this momentum, the team sought to streamline delivery and installation processes — a strategic move to:

Increase rollout speed. Deliver updates and fixes faster to help Carbonio users access improvements sooner and strengthen a competitive edge.
Reduce support burden. Improve system stability and responsiveness to minimize downtimes and lower the pressure on support teams.
Grow partner-led installations. Simplify deployment and configuration to lower technical barriers and empower more partners to roll out Carbonio independently.

Behind these business goals lay a partially manual post-development lifecycle, a bottleneck for a scalable, multi-module platform like Carbonio. The team needed to:

Speed up quality assurance. Regression testing took 35 hours per cycle, stalling release pipelines and diverting developer time, while undetected defects led to costly hotfixes.
Simplify and accelerate deployment. Every server, module, and integration had to be configured by hand, consuming valuable time and demanding deep technical expertise.
Streamline development. Inherited architectural components made day-to-day development more demanding, leaving less room for innovation.

That’s why they needed a partner experienced in complex process transformation — one who could collaborate on removing bottlenecks and enabling faster product releases.

Automate manual processes for faster releases

Solution we delivered

As part of the client’s international team, Innowise quickly joined Zextras’s project, introducing an automation-first approach. We identified the major blockers and eliminated root bottlenecks with structured frameworks that solved causes rather than patching symptoms.

QA as a continuous service

Innowise QA team found that manual QA was crippled by regression-heavy integrations, unpredictable content issues, and inconsistent results across environments. To break through, we re-engineered testing around full automation.

From there, Zextras gained a continuous, resilient QA pipeline that validates UI components in every release and catches a majority of bugs before they reach production. With architecture mapped and business-critical flows prioritized, our testing automation approach now drives predictable and stable releases through:

Complete case coverage — all essential user flows are now validated automatically, from basic functions like sending and receiving emails to complex operations in file storage and video conferencing modules.
Multiple browser support — tests run on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge with optimized resource usage. By leveraging the shared Chromium engine in Chrome and Edge, we minimized duplication by running most tests in Chromium.
Proactive problem detection — browser driver issues are identified ahead of official browser updates, preventing problems that might arise in later versions. This preemptive approach saves resources and speeds up testing.
Dynamic environment support — tests can be executed on any environment simply by specifying the server URL, making it easy to validate modules across different configurations.
Reliability with edge cases. — by running tests with varied datasets, we ensured unusual inputs, exceptions, or conditions couldn’t otherwise break the system.
Accessible reporting. — for each bug scenario, test reports provide screenshots, videos, request logs, and outputs, enabling PMs, technical and non-technical staff to spot and prioritize issues immediately.

Most importantly, QA is now embedded in development itself. With the automation suite integrated into Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, every build and deployment triggers a full UI check, catching issues early and protecting release velocity.

For now, our two-engineer QA automation team delivered 900+ automated tests covering critical daily-use scenarios — from email transactions and calendar scheduling to file storage and chat. To ensure reliability, we set and consistently maintained a KPI of 90%+ test stability across all runs.

And it keeps evolving: we continually refine the framework, removing older custom solutions as the product evolves and adapting locators during React 17→18 migration. Also, we expanded coverage with CLI automation, added tests as the product evolves, and improved strengthening for long-term maintainability.

Deployment & operations excellence

Innowise’s DevOps unit helped the client optimize a deployment process by introducing greater automation at scale. Both updates and client installations that once drained time and resources now run faster, safer, and with consistent reliability.

Here’s what made the difference:

Infrastructure as code (IaC) — installations and updates are now fully automated with Ansible playbooks. Proxies and database settings are codified, making deployments repeatable, low-risk, and instantly scalable across clients and data centers. New environments can be stood up much faster.
Continuous monitoring (in progress) — for internal infrastructures, Prometheus exporters and customized Grafana dashboards track performance, load, antivirus activity, service health, and more. Centralized logs flag anomalies, helping prevent issues before they disrupt users.
High availability (HA) component — PostgreSQL can be configured with redundancy and automated failover to safeguard the platform’s core data. This setup ensures database safety, reliable transactions, and resilience for services that depend on it.
Migration tooling — in collaboration with the client’s other units, dedicated utilities were developed to support the migration of mail, calendars, contacts, and accounts from third-party platforms. This helped reduce downtime and simplify onboarding, while maintaining data integrity, privacy, and continuity.
Release management automation — with CI/CD, Ansible playbooks are packaged into collections and automatically published to Ansible Galaxy or a private hub. This gives clients one-click installation, faster onboarding, and confidence that every version is tested and ready for use.

We support custom installations, tailoring Carbonio to diverse client environments. This means redesigning its architecture in edge cases ranging from single-server setups for lightweight use, to high-volume email infrastructures, to deployments supporting extensive parallel conferencing. By addressing these non-standard scenarios, we help Zextras deliver personalized, reliable, and scalable experiences for every client.

Ongoing support: seamless feature growth & onboarding

Being embedded in the client’s development team, Innowise contributed Java expertise that supported broader efforts to make Carbonio’s core more resilient and future-ready. We started with clearing long-standing roadblocks through deep refactoring, clean code practices, and redesigning features on modern language versions — improvements that helped boost maintainability, performance, and long-term cost efficiency.

In ongoing development, this joint effort has reinforced Carbonio’s position as a secure and dependable workplace platform. Notable advancements include:

Secure, certificate-based emailing with S/MIME encryption;
Encrypted traffic with TLS/SSL certificates and automated renewal tooling;
Stronger admin controls, including password reset, account rename, and helpdesk rights management;
Legal hold functionality to support compliance requirements in regulated industries;
Faster synchronization of emails, calendars, and contacts under extreme loads.

We continue to play an active role in Carbonio’s evolution, contributing enhancements and bug fixes that help keep the product stable, secure, and aligned with shifting market demands.

The manual burden of such a complex, multi-modular product as Carbonio was weighing down the team and pushing release dates further out. Our goal was to make product testing and installations a hassle-free routine. With QA and deployment automation, Zextras is now confident in product quality, and can actively grow partner-led installations.

Andrew Artyukhovsky Lead of Quality Assurance

Technologies used

AQA

Playwright, Fiddler, CI/CD via Jenkins, GitHub, Allure

DevOps & system engineering

Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Ansible, vSphere, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, HAProxy, PfSense, ClamAV, kLDAP, Apache Kafka, Ubuntu, Loki, Vector, Zookeeper, Patroni, Docker, Python, Azure

Backend

Java 11, Java 17, Java 21, Jetty, Jersey, Guice, LDAP, SOAP, Maven, Linux, Bash, Perl, GitHub, AWS Lambda

Team

AQA Engineers

Software Engineer

DevOps Engineer

Solution Architect

Results

Project duration

July 2022 – Present

An automation-first approach reshaped Zextras’s post-development lifecycle, delivering:

Testing cycles 105x faster — cut from 35 hours to 20 minutes.
98% fewer production bugs — issues in customer support dropped significantly.
≥90% automated test pass rate — reliability locked in across all runs.
240+ critical defects intercepted pre-production — issues that could have caused outages never reached users.
Collaboration streamlined — clear, visual reports let PMs, support, and development teams make faster, data-driven decisions.
Resources optimized — automation slashed manual testing overhead, redirecting time and budget toward faster feature delivery.
Deployment accelerated 10x — client installations and updates became faster and consistently repeatable.
Release cycles shortened 3x — new features reached the market quicker.
Partner rollouts enabled — automated installation opened the door to partner-led deployments, creating new revenue streams.

With quicker feature releases and a partner-friendly distribution model, Carbonio solidifies its standing as a competitive, self-hosted alternative to global cloud collaboration providers. The Innowise team continues to support the product by expanding automated testing coverage, fixing bugs, and introducing new features to make it more stable, secure, and user-friendly.

Automate manual processes for faster releases

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