Waterfall model in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding the Waterfall Model

📖 Scenario: You are part of a software development team planning a new project. Your manager wants you to understand the Waterfall model, a traditional way to organize software development in clear, sequential steps.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple outline of the Waterfall model phases as a list, add a variable to track the current phase, create a loop to display each phase in order, and finally mark the project as complete after all phases.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called phases with the exact Waterfall model phases in order: 'Requirements', 'Design', 'Implementation', 'Verification', 'Maintenance'

Create a variable called current_phase_index and set it to 0

Use a while loop to iterate through phases using current_phase_index

After the loop, create a variable called project_status and set it to 'Complete'

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

The Waterfall model is used in software projects where requirements are well understood and changes are minimal, such as in government or large enterprise systems.

💼 Career

Understanding the Waterfall model helps software engineers and project managers plan and communicate project phases clearly, especially in traditional development environments.

1

Create the Waterfall model phases list

Create a list called phases with these exact strings in order: 'Requirements', 'Design', 'Implementation', 'Verification', 'Maintenance'

Software Engineering

# Create the list of Waterfall model phases
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a list and separate each phase with commas.

2

Set the current phase index

Create a variable called current_phase_index and set it to 0 to start at the first phase

Software Engineering

phases = ['Requirements', 'Design', 'Implementation', 'Verification', 'Maintenance']
# Set the starting index for the current phase
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment to set current_phase_index to zero.

3

Loop through the phases using the index

Use a while loop that runs while current_phase_index is less than the length of phases. Inside the loop, access the current phase with phases[current_phase_index] and then increase current_phase_index by 1

Software Engineering

phases = ['Requirements', 'Design', 'Implementation', 'Verification', 'Maintenance']
current_phase_index = 0
# Loop through the phases using current_phase_index
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use len(phases) to get the number of phases and increase the index inside the loop.

4

Mark the project as complete

After the loop, create a variable called project_status and set it to the string 'Complete'

Software Engineering

phases = ['Requirements', 'Design', 'Implementation', 'Verification', 'Maintenance']
current_phase_index = 0
while current_phase_index < len(phases):
    phase = phases[current_phase_index]
    current_phase_index += 1
# Set the project status to 'Complete'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string 'Complete' to the variable project_status after the loop ends.