Introducing Benesferatu: elevating code quality at Travelgate with AI

At Travelgate, we are constantly striving to improve the quality, security, and efficiency of our codebase. Today, we are proud to introduce Benesferatu, an AI-powered tool designed specifically to help us achieve those goals.

What is Benesferatu?

Benesferatu is an advanced AI system that automatically reviews every code change submitted through pull requests across Travelgate projects. It meticulously analyzes code diffs, detecting potential bugs, security vulnerabilities, inefficient patterns, and style inconsistencies. Most importantly, it verifies that our code aligns with ASP.NET Core best practices. Findings are posted directly as comments within the pull request, making it easy for developers to take immediate action.

Who benefits from Benesferatu?

While Benesferatu targets all developers across the company, its initial and most significant impact has been among our Integration Teams, who are directly benefiting from its daily use. As the tool evolves, it will continue to expand its reach and benefit the wider Travelgate development community.

What does Benesferatu detect?

Benesferatu brings a level of vigilance and precision to code reviews that is unparalleled. It detects:

• Programming errors that could lead to bugs.

• Inefficient coding patterns that could hurt performance.

• Security issues like hard-coded passwords.

• Style violations, such as comments written in Spanish instead of English, ensuring consistency across our codebase.

Impact on Travelgate

The introduction of Benesferatu has led to a significant quality leap across multiple areas:

• Security: Early detection of vulnerabilities.

• Maintainability: More consistent, clean, and readable code.

• Efficiency: Faster, more robust code execution.

Jesús  Corrius Llavina, Head of Architecture at Travelgate says "In just two months, Benesferatu has helped detect and correct over 1,000 errors that, without it, might have reached production. Many of these issues were previously only discovered after customer complaints — now, they are caught and addressed much earlier in the process." 

The future of Benesferatu

We are already working on the next evolution of Benesferatu: empowering it to read customer specifications and documentation and automatically validate that our code aligns with those specifications. This enhancement will make Benesferatu even smarter and even more critical to our development process.

Built by and for Travelgate

Benesferatu has been developed in-house by the Architecture team at Travelgate, with valuable input and suggestions from multiple departments. Integration projects have been the initial focus due to their business criticality, but the long-term vision is company-wide adoption.

Overcoming the challenges

One of the greatest challenges during development was selecting the right AI models and adapting them realistically to our specific needs. Instead of chasing hype, we built Benesferatu with solid engineering principles and a deep understanding of our operational reality, a choice that has paid off greatly.

Benesferatu is not just another tool; it's a new guardian for our code. It represents a big step forward in ensuring that Travelgate’s software is safer, more efficient, and ready for the future.