About OBDS
Short for On-Board Data Systems, OBDS designs, develops, and distributes electronic checklists and flight bag products to aircraft pilots, operators, fleets, and OEMs worldwide. Its software systems are relied on by thousands of pilots to deliver 400,000+ up-to-date technical documents every day. Manufacturers like Airbus, Bombardier, Cessna, Dassault, and Pilatus trust OBDS to deliver the right docs on schedule to the right operator, every time.
“The worst situation in our industry is what we call an AOG (Aircraft on Ground)… If a pilot doesn’t get the right flight manuals, or if there’s an error during delivery, they may not be allowed to fly. Reliability at OBDS is job number one. ”
Challenges
To meet today’s technological standards for aircraft documentation, OBDS develops mobile applications, backend services, and support systems in C#, Objective-C, and Swift to reliably deliver flight and maintenance manuals to the operators that need them.
Meeting industry standards: Manuals change on a high frequency, so information quality is imperative and OBDS follows ISO (International Organization for Standardization) guidelines for ISO 27001 – the global gold standard for information security management. So Charles and OBDS sought AI tooling for support.
Fitting their development pipeline: The OBDS CI/CD pipeline enforces requirements traceability, with each requirement mapped to test cases for validation by the QA team. Development follows a Kanban methodology, with the 20-member engineering team coding in GitHub feature branches and integrating code suggestions through Bito’s AI Code Review Agent to catch errors before QA testing. After automated unit and black-box testing, verified code merges to the main branch, where follow-up automated and manual validation testing maintains compliance, all in the effort to minimize risks such as AOG (Aircraft on Ground).
Solutions
After exploring AI coding assistants and extensions, including GitHub Copilot and Qodo (formerly Codium), OBDS chose Bito as the right solution for its thoroughness and ease of use.
Here’s what OBDS and Charles value most about Bito:
AI code reviews in GitHub: Bito seamlessly integrates with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket to run its reviews, analysis, and summaries as native comment threads.
AI that understands your code: Bito can be configured to access and understand your codebase to bring the right context to each review, just like a senior engineer.
Static code analysis: Leveraging best-in-class analysis tools like Astral Ruff, Mypy, fbinfer, and Sonar, Bito reviews code thoroughly to meet industry standards.
Pro code suggestions: High quality suggestions and code fixes at the line level and inline setup your reviewing engineers to spend their time effectively and efficiently.
Pull request summaries and changelists: Each pull request that Bito reviews gets an organized and legible summary, so teams can quickly catch up with what each code change is written to accomplish.
Enterprise-grade security: It’s your code, within your control. No code is stored, and no code is used for AI model training. Bito is proud to be SOC 2 Type I certified and adhere to industry standards for security.
Results
136,500 lines of code reviewed: Within minutes of integrating Bito with OBDS’s GitHub environment, it was reviewing code in pull requests and beta test deployments. It has best-in-class analysis tooling built in, so its impact was obvious and immediate via Bito’s submitter analytics dashboard even for a small (and mighty) team of 20 engineers like OBDS’s.
“Code quality is what makes or breaks your business when it’s designed for reliability and Bito delivers on that value.”
— Charles Guerin, CEO at OBDS
473 Issues found: Bito works quickly and thoroughly to cover vast repositories of code, it can be astounding. When one of OBDS’s senior engineers checked in a small change to a codebase that hadn’t been touched in over a year, Bito uncovered 100+ issues that needed attention!
“Bito is like a smart pair of eyes that watches over the code we’re shipping. It catches even the little human mistakes that programmers make that can affect an entire pipeline.”
— Charles Guerin, CEO at OBDS
24 Hours per sprint cycle saved: Due to its nature and industry, the OBDS codebase has over 1,000,000 lines of code. Until recently, all of that code was managed and maintained solely by arduous manual code reviews — a process saved by Bito’s efficient, automated analysis. When OBDS encountered an issue such as an HTTP request causing app stalls, Bito was able to identify the problems on-demand.
“It would have been a programmer looking through all of that code for hours… but Bito caught the logic errors and prevented unhandled exceptions saving us valuable time.”
Conflict avoidance: By removing personal bias, Bito prevents miscommunication and reduces potential friction during code reviews. Engineers can focus on improving the code instead of debating subjective preferences.
“One of the unexpected values of Bito’s AI code reviews is that it doesn’t accuse you of anything. Bito says: here’s what’s going on and here’s what you might consider doing about it. Engineers look at it as a time saver, not a supervisor. They’d rather the computer yell at them, not me!”
22% Acceptance rate of Bito’s suggestions: Helping OBDS meet its rigorous standards before code reaches the quality assurance team, Bito establishes itself as a reliable tool that increases code quality and deliverability in an industry where precision is crucial.
“Funny enough, our better programmers are actually getting more code feedback than our juniors! And when they get feedback from Bito, they’re acting on it. I’ve got to say, it’s resulting in good, clean code.”
