Victor Hugo's timeless observation, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come", resonates today as Quantum Computing, once only a dream of a physicist, stands at the threshold of reality with the potential to revolutionise the world. To comprehend the surge of attention it commands today, one must delve into the motivations that birthed and nurtured Quantum Computing. While the past of Quantum Computing provides insights into the present, the future could unfold through the lens of Quantum Software Engineering. Quantum Software Engineering, guided by its principles and methodologies investigates the most effective ways to interact with Quantum Computers to unlock their true potential and usher in a new era of possibilities. To gain insight into the present landscape and anticipate the trajectory of Quantum Computing and Quantum Software Engineering, this paper embarks on a journey through their evolution and outlines potential directions for future research. By doing so, we aim to equip readers (ideally software engineers and computer scientists not necessarily with quantum expertise) with the insights necessary to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of Quantum Computing and anticipate the trajectories that lie ahead.
Victor Hugo's timeless observation, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come", resonates today as Quantum Computing, once only a dream of a physicist, stands at the threshold of reality with the potential to revolutionise the world. To comprehend the surge of attention it commands today, one must delve into the motivations that birthed and nurtured Quantum Computing. While the past of Quantum Computing provides insights into the present, the future could unfold through the lens of Quantum Software Engineering. Quantum Software Engineering, guided by its principles and methodologies investigates the most effective ways to interact with Quantum Computers to unlock their true potential and usher in a new era of possibilities. To gain insight into the present landscape and anticipate the trajectory of Quantum Computing and Quantum Software Engineering, this paper embarks on a journey through their evolution and outlines potential directions for future research. By doing so, we aim to equip readers (ideally software engineers and computer scientists not necessarily with quantum expertise) with the insights necessary to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of Quantum Computing and anticipate the trajectories that lie ahead.
Abstract Quantum computing is an emerging field in which theoretical principles are being transformed into practical applications, largely due to the efforts of the developer community. In order to ensure that quantum software engineering continues to advance, it is vital to understand the experiences, challenges, and aspirations of developers. This chapter is a continuation of our previous work, which provided a comprehensive survey exploring the adoption patterns and common challenges in quantum software engineering. In addition to the survey, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field to gain a deeper and more detailed understanding of their perspectives. Through the interviews and survey findings, we have gained nuanced insights into the motivations, hurdles, and outlook of developers toward the rapidly evolving quantum computing landscape. We describe the research methodology in detail, including the tools and techniques used, in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the research process. Furthermore, we present critical insights from both the survey and interviews, enriching the narrative with fresh perspectives obtained from the post-publication interviews. This chapter is a blend of academic investigation and real-world practitioner insights, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of quantum software engineering. By illuminating the path for future research and development in this dynamic field, we hope to guide the way toward continued progress and innovation.
Abstract Quantum software engineering is advancing in the domain of quantum computing research and application, yet the documentation is scattered. The slow transition from Von-Neumann based computation systems to quantum systems, and conserving the fundamental computing principles in software development and software engineering helps in enrichment of quantum software development. The evolution of quantum computing over the past years shows a shift in the domain of classical computation to quantum computation in the years to come. Future applications such as, quantum AI and quantum machine learning will benefit from quantum software engineering. This survey collects and explores the various documentations in the domain of quantum systems and quantum software engineering. The survey provides an in-depth exploration of quantum programming languages, which is combined with explanations of quantum computing’s fundamentals. The review also goes in-depth about quantum software engineering and quantum software life cycle development, outlining the quantum software reuse methodology that is introduced in the quantum software lifecycle development domain.
The study delves into the revolutionary potential of quantum computing, exploring its foundational principles, software platforms, challenges, and future trajectories.The introduction highlights the profound impact anticipated in the software development realm due to quantum computing's revolutionary influence.The exploration of basic principles immerses into quantum mechanics, introducing key concepts like superposition, entanglement, and quantum parallelism, elucidating the unprecedented computational capabilities enabled by quantum bits.The subsequent section scrutinizes well-known quantum computing software platforms, offering insights into their functionalities.Platforms such as IBM Quantum Experience, D-Wave Leap, Microsoft Quantum Development Kit, Google Cirq and TensorFlow Quantum, Rigetti Forest, Qiskit, Amazon Braket, Xanadu PennyLane, and QuTiP are detailed, underscoring their pivotal role in bridging theoretical quantum principles with practical applications.The paper then tackles the challenges and future trajectories of quantum computing.Quantum decoherence, error correction, scalability, qubit stability, noise and interference, quantum software and algorithms, standardization, hybrid quantum-classical systems, quantum communication, materials science and engineering, education and workforce, and ethical and societal implications undergo critical examination.The study highlights the imperative need for collaborative efforts from academia, industry, and government to surmount these challenges and propel the progress of quantum computing.In conclusion, the study underscores the dynamic nature of the quantum computing landscape and the continuous requirement for ongoing research and technological advancements.The delineated challenges and future trajectories serve as a guide for researchers, developers, and policymakers to navigate the intricate realm of quantum computing, ensuring its responsible and impactful integration across diverse domains.
As quantum computers advance, the complexity of the software they can execute increases as well. To ensure this software is efficient, maintainable, reusable, and cost-effective—key qualities of any industry-grade software—mature software engineering practices must be applied throughout its design, development, and operation. However, the significant differences between classical and quantum software make it challenging to directly apply classical software engineering methods to quantum systems. This challenge has led to the emergence of Quantum Software Engineering (QSE) as a distinct field within the broader software engineering landscape. In this work, a group of active researchers analyze in depth the current state of QSE research. From this analysis, the key areas of QSE are identified and explored in order to determine the most relevant open challenges that should be addressed in the next years. These challenges help identify necessary breakthroughs and future research directions for advancing QSE.
This book is an analysis of quantum computing, covering everything from its foundational principles to practical applications in the development of quantum services. It offers a technical and complex overview to provide the necessary knowledge to any researcher, scientist or developer who wants to get into service-oriented quantum computing. The field of quantum computing has evolved rapidly in recent years, with the potential to revolutionize the way we approach complex problems in various fields. This comprehensive guide covers the fundamental principles of quantum computing and its practical applications in the development of quantum services. Beyond theoretical knowledge, the book goes on to explore some of the challenges that quantum software developers face in today’s landscape. It addresses issues related to low-level abstractions and the absence of integration, deployment and quality assurance mechanisms in quantum software engineering. Also, it explores the principles of service-oriented computing applied to quantum computing, revealing architectural patterns adapted to quantum computing and discussing standardization and accessibility in this field. It also provides insight into streamlining the deployment process through a DevOps approach for continuous deployment of quantum services. This book will serve as a guide for all researchers, scientists and developers by providing them with an understanding of the current limitations and problems in quantum computing-oriented software development, and how to address them with software engineering techniques and tools applied to quantum computing.
Despite the increasing interest in quantum computing, the aspect of development to achieve cost-effective and reliable quantum software applications has been slow. One barrier is the software engineering of quantum programs, which can be approached from two directions. On the one hand, many software engineering practices, debugging in particular, are bound to classical computing. On the other hand, quantum programming is closely associated with the phenomena of quantum physics, and consequently, the way we express programs resembles the early days of programming. Moreover, much of the software engineering research today focuses on agile development, where computing cycles are cheap and new software can be rapidly deployed and tested, whereas in the quantum context, executions may consume lots of energy, and test runs may require lots of work to interpret. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap by starting with the quantum computing workflow and by mapping existing software engineering research to this workflow. Based on the mapping, we then identify directions for software engineering research for quantum computing.