Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

📖 Scenario: You are managing a small software project to build a simple mobile app. To organize the work clearly, you want to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) that lists all the main tasks and subtasks.

🎯 Goal: Build a clear Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as a nested dictionary showing main tasks and their subtasks.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary named wbs with main tasks as keys and lists of subtasks as values

Add a variable project_name to store the project title

Use a for loop to print each main task and its subtasks

Add a final summary string summary describing the total number of main tasks

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Project managers use WBS to organize and plan all the work needed for a project clearly and simply.

💼 Career

Understanding WBS helps in roles like project management, software development planning, and team coordination.

1

Set up the initial Work Breakdown Structure dictionary

Create a dictionary called wbs with these exact entries: 'Design': ['UI Design', 'UX Research'], 'Development': ['Frontend', 'Backend'], and 'Testing': ['Unit Testing', 'Integration Testing'].

Software Engineering

# Create the wbs dictionary with main tasks and subtasks
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys as main tasks and values as lists of subtasks.

2

Add the project name variable

Create a variable called project_name and set it to the string 'Mobile App Project'.

Software Engineering

wbs = {
    'Design': ['UI Design', 'UX Research'],
    'Development': ['Frontend', 'Backend'],
    'Testing': ['Unit Testing', 'Integration Testing']
}
# Create the project_name variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact string to the variable project_name.

3

Loop through the WBS to list tasks and subtasks

Use a for loop with variables main_task and subtasks to iterate over wbs.items(). Inside the loop, create a string task_list that joins the subtasks with commas.

Software Engineering

wbs = {
    'Design': ['UI Design', 'UX Research'],
    'Development': ['Frontend', 'Backend'],
    'Testing': ['Unit Testing', 'Integration Testing']
}

project_name = 'Mobile App Project'

for main_task, subtasks in wbs.items():
    # Create task_list string joining subtasks
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use for main_task, subtasks in wbs.items(): and task_list = ', '.join(subtasks).

4

Add a summary string with the total number of main tasks

Create a string variable called summary that uses an f-string to say: 'The project has X main tasks.' where X is the number of keys in wbs.

Software Engineering

wbs = {
    'Design': ['UI Design', 'UX Research'],
    'Development': ['Frontend', 'Backend'],
    'Testing': ['Unit Testing', 'Integration Testing']
}

project_name = 'Mobile App Project'

for main_task, subtasks in wbs.items():
    task_list = ', '.join(subtasks)

summary = ''  # Create summary string here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an f-string with len(wbs) to count main tasks.