Import an existing codebase

Not every project starts from nothing. If the code already exists, Taiga can read the repository and draft the project’s documents from it, rather than asking you to describe a system you have already built.

Starting an import

Choose Import codebase when you create the project.

You can also start from an empty project: link a repository and begin the analysis from the project dashboard. Either way, a linked repository is the prerequisite. There is nothing to analyze without one.

What happens

The import runs in three stages, and you can leave the page while it works.

1. Analyzing the codebase. Reading the repository to work out what it is and how it is built.
2. Generating the specification. Producing a specification draft from what the code shows.
3. Generating the documents. Producing the remaining design and security documents from that specification.

You do not have to run the third stage document by document the way a new project does. Generate All Documents produces the remaining set in one go.

When it finishes you have a full document set marked ready for review.

Review before you plan

An imported specification is inferred from code, and inference is where this path differs from Discovery.

Code shows what a system does. It does not show what it was for, which constraints were deliberate, or which parts are known to be wrong and already scheduled for replacement. Some of what you read will be an accurate description of an accident.

Read the specification first, before the documents generated from it. It is the input to everything else, so a wrong assumption there is one you will meet repeatedly.

Three things worth checking specifically:

• Purpose. Does the stated vision match why the system exists, or only what it currently does?
• Deliberate versus incidental. A pattern that appears everywhere may be a standard or may be a habit nobody has revisited.
• Known problems. Anything you already intend to change will have been read as intent. Correct it now, or agents will preserve it.

After the import

From here the project behaves like any other. The specification and documents are yours to edit, version and republish, and the Codebase Snapshot gives you the as-built record separate from what you intend (see project documents).

Anything you had to correct during review is worth writing down as standing instructions, so it applies to future work instead of being corrected again each time. Write intake agents can act on covers where that goes.