The goal of the Joist project is to provide a platform for building web applications that handles the common housekeeping chores. These controls include:

• Creation, deletion, and management of user accounts, including user roles and permissions.
• Creation, deletion, and managment of projects, and CVS modules under those projects.
• Configuration of hosted tools such as mailing lists, bug tracking systems, automated build systems, source code browsing systems, etc.
• Monitor the activity level and other metrics of the process and the product being developed.

As it exisits today, Tigris is a combination of best-of-breed open source development tools. These tools were never meant to work together, and each must be installed and configured separately. Helm addresses some of the configuration difficulties by providing a set of administrative web pages.

In the future, Tigris's current best-of-breed tools will be replaced with new and more powerful tools that are meant to work together in meaningful ways. Also, many new tools will be added for project management, knowledge management, build management, and other functions. Helm will grow to configure all these tools in an understandable way.

• CVS repository, mailing lists, and bugzilla are set up.
• Code is checked into the repository.
• An initial install script has been written.