Gantt charts and project scheduling in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Building a Simple Gantt Chart for Project Scheduling

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small project with several tasks. You want to organize these tasks visually to see their start and end dates clearly. A Gantt chart is a great way to do this.Imagine you have a list of tasks with their start and end days. You want to create a simple Gantt chart representation to help track the project schedule.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Gantt chart data structure that lists tasks with their start and end days, then create a schedule overview showing which days each task covers.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with tasks as keys and their start and end days as values

Add a variable to represent the total project duration in days

Use a loop to generate a schedule overview showing each task's active days

Complete the schedule by adding a summary line showing the total project length

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Project managers use Gantt charts to plan and track tasks over time, ensuring projects stay on schedule.

💼 Career

Understanding Gantt charts is essential for roles in project management, software development, and any field involving scheduling and resource planning.

1

Create the tasks dictionary

Create a dictionary called tasks with these exact entries: 'Design': (1, 5), 'Development': (6, 15), 'Testing': (16, 20), 'Deployment': (21, 22). Each value is a tuple representing the start and end day of the task.

Software Engineering

# Create the tasks dictionary with start and end days
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary. Each task name is a key, and the value is a tuple with two numbers.

2

Add total project duration

Add a variable called total_days and set it to 22, representing the total length of the project in days.

Software Engineering

tasks = {
    'Design': (1, 5),
    'Development': (6, 15),
    'Testing': (16, 20),
    'Deployment': (21, 22)
}
# Add total_days variable here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable and assign the number 22 to it.

3

Generate schedule overview

Use a for loop with variables task and days to iterate over tasks.items(). Inside the loop, create a list called active_days that contains all days from the start to the end day (inclusive) for each task.

Software Engineering

tasks = {
    'Design': (1, 5),
    'Development': (6, 15),
    'Testing': (16, 20),
    'Deployment': (21, 22)
}
total_days = 22
for task, days in tasks.items():
    # Create active_days list here
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use range(start, end + 1) to include the last day.

4

Add project summary line

After the loop, add a variable called summary and set it to the string "Project duration: 22 days" to complete the schedule overview.

Software Engineering

tasks = {
    'Design': (1, 5),
    'Development': (6, 15),
    'Testing': (16, 20),
    'Deployment': (21, 22)
}
total_days = 22
for task, days in tasks.items():
    active_days = list(range(days[0], days[1] + 1))
# Add summary variable here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Create a string variable exactly as shown.