Kanban overview in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Kanban Overview

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small software project and want to organize tasks visually to improve workflow and team communication.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Kanban board structure that shows tasks in different stages: To Do, In Progress, and Done.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary named kanban_board with three keys: 'To Do', 'In Progress', and 'Done'.

Each key should have a list of task names as values.

Create a variable named max_tasks_per_column and set it to 5.

Use a loop to count how many tasks are in each column and store the counts in a dictionary named task_counts.

Add a final step to check if any column exceeds the max_tasks_per_column and create a dictionary named overloaded_columns with column names as keys and boolean values.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Kanban boards help teams visualize work progress and manage tasks efficiently in software projects and other workflows.

💼 Career

Understanding Kanban is useful for project managers, developers, and team members to improve productivity and communication.

1

Create the Kanban board data structure

Create a dictionary called kanban_board with these exact keys and values: 'To Do' with tasks 'Design UI' and 'Write specs', 'In Progress' with tasks 'Develop feature', and 'Done' with tasks 'Setup repo' and 'Initial commit'.

Software Engineering

# Create the kanban_board dictionary with the specified tasks
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys as column names and values as lists of task strings.

2

Set the maximum tasks per column

Create a variable called max_tasks_per_column and set it to the number 5.

Software Engineering

kanban_board = {
    'To Do': ['Design UI', 'Write specs'],
    'In Progress': ['Develop feature'],
    'Done': ['Setup repo', 'Initial commit']
}
# Set max_tasks_per_column to 5
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 5 to the variable max_tasks_per_column.

3

Count tasks in each column

Create a dictionary called task_counts that stores the number of tasks in each column of kanban_board. Use a for loop with variables column and tasks to iterate over kanban_board.items() and set task_counts[column] to the length of tasks.

Software Engineering

kanban_board = {
    'To Do': ['Design UI', 'Write specs'],
    'In Progress': ['Develop feature'],
    'Done': ['Setup repo', 'Initial commit']
}
max_tasks_per_column = 5
# Create task_counts dictionary with counts of tasks per column
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop to go through each column and count tasks with len().

4

Identify overloaded columns

Create a dictionary called overloaded_columns that stores true if a column in task_counts has more tasks than max_tasks_per_column, otherwise false. Use a for loop with variables column and count to iterate over task_counts.items() and set overloaded_columns[column] accordingly.

Software Engineering

kanban_board = {
    'To Do': ['Design UI', 'Write specs'],
    'In Progress': ['Develop feature'],
    'Done': ['Setup repo', 'Initial commit']
}
max_tasks_per_column = 5
task_counts = {}
for column, tasks in kanban_board.items():
    task_counts[column] = len(tasks)
# Create overloaded_columns dictionary to check if any column exceeds max_tasks_per_column
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Compare each count to max_tasks_per_column and store the result as a boolean.