Software engineering principles - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Software Engineering Principles

📖 Scenario: You are part of a small software team building a simple app. To keep your work organized and efficient, you need to understand some basic software engineering principles.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple list of key software engineering principles with their brief descriptions to help your team remember and apply them.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called principles with exact principle names as keys and their descriptions as values.

Add a variable called min_length to set the minimum length of principle descriptions to consider.

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary filtered_principles containing only principles with descriptions longer than min_length.

Add a final key-value pair to filtered_principles to include a summary principle.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Software engineers use principles like modularity and encapsulation to build reliable and maintainable software systems.

💼 Career

Understanding and applying software engineering principles is essential for writing clean code, collaborating in teams, and managing complex projects.

1

Create the initial principles dictionary

Create a dictionary called principles with these exact entries: 'Modularity' with description 'Divide the system into separate components.', 'Encapsulation' with description 'Hide internal details and expose only necessary parts.', and 'DRY' with description 'Don\'t Repeat Yourself - avoid code duplication.'.

Software Engineering

# Create the principles dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys and values as strings.

2

Add a minimum description length variable

Add a variable called min_length and set it to 30 to filter principles by description length.

Software Engineering

principles = {
    'Modularity': 'Divide the system into separate components.',
    'Encapsulation': 'Hide internal details and expose only necessary parts.',
    'DRY': 'Don\'t Repeat Yourself - avoid code duplication.'
}
# Add min_length variable below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set min_length to 30 using a simple assignment.

3

Filter principles by description length

Use a dictionary comprehension to create a new dictionary called filtered_principles that includes only those entries from principles where the description length is greater than min_length.

Software Engineering

principles = {
    'Modularity': 'Divide the system into separate components.',
    'Encapsulation': 'Hide internal details and expose only necessary parts.',
    'DRY': 'Don\'t Repeat Yourself - avoid code duplication.'
}
min_length = 30
# Create filtered_principles dictionary using comprehension
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {key: desc for key, desc in principles.items() if len(desc) > min_length} to filter.

4

Add a summary principle to filtered dictionary

Add a new key-value pair to filtered_principles with key 'Summary' and value 'Apply principles to write clean and maintainable code.'.

Software Engineering

principles = {
    'Modularity': 'Divide the system into separate components.',
    'Encapsulation': 'Hide internal details and expose only necessary parts.',
    'DRY': 'Don\'t Repeat Yourself - avoid code duplication.'
}
min_length = 30
filtered_principles = {key: desc for key, desc in principles.items() if len(desc) > min_length}
# Add the summary principle below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use filtered_principles['Summary'] = 'Apply principles to write clean and maintainable code.' to add the new entry.