Quantum software testing (QST) is a central quality-assurance activity for checking whether quantum programs conform to their specifications. In the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, gate, decoherence, and measurement errors distort observed outputs, making it difficult to distinguish program defects from noise. The existing noise-aware QST literature typically mitigates or models noise before applying a test oracle. However, these strategies can incur substantial cost and depend on calibration data, model training, or backend-specific information, limiting their applicability. We present Qomino, a dominance-guided QST approach for judging tests from noisy samples without a separate noise-estimation or mitigation phase. The approach combines decomposition-aware inverse construction, comparison of the expected outcome with the strongest observed competitor, and bounded retries for inconclusive decisions. We evaluate Qomino on 30 controlled buggy variants from six Qiskit programs and six simulated noisy backends, comparing it with six baselines spanning statistical, quantum-specific, and learning-based methods. Qomino achieves 85.65% accuracy over all six programs and 99.95% in the restricted two-program evaluation, significantly outperforming the corresponding baselines. Across the evaluated programs and backends under the stated settings, Qomino is faster than the compared quantum-specific and learning-based methods. Ablation and retry analyses support the contributions of its main components.
Quantum software testing (QST) is a central quality-assurance activity for checking whether quantum programs conform to their specifications. In the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, gate, decoherence, and measurement errors distort observed outputs, making it difficult to distinguish program defects from noise. The existing noise-aware QST literature typically mitigates or models noise before applying a test oracle. However, these strategies can incur substantial cost and depend on calibration data, model training, or backend-specific information, limiting their applicability. We present Qomino, a dominance-guided QST approach for judging tests from noisy samples without a separate noise-estimation or mitigation phase. The approach combines decomposition-aware inverse construction, comparison of the expected outcome with the strongest observed competitor, and bounded retries for inconclusive decisions. We evaluate Qomino on 30 controlled buggy variants from six Qiskit programs and six simulated noisy backends, comparing it with six baselines spanning statistical, quantum-specific, and learning-based methods. Qomino achieves 85.65% accuracy over all six programs and 99.95% in the restricted two-program evaluation, significantly outperforming the corresponding baselines. Across the evaluated programs and backends under the stated settings, Qomino is faster than the compared quantum-specific and learning-based methods. Ablation and retry analyses support the contributions of its main components.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware has transformed quantum computing into a practical experimental platform while introducing fundamental challenges associated with hardware noise, decoherence, and probabilistic execution. Although quantum software testing (QST) has rapidly emerged as an active research area, it remains unclear to what extent existing testing methodologies explicitly engage with noisy and hardware-constrained execution environments. This paper presents a systematic empirical landscape analysis of noise-awareness in QST research through a deterministic, taxonomy-guided analytical framework applied to 61 papers published between 2018 and 2025 across eight testing paradigms, contrasting how contributions are framed with how they are evaluated. Among the analyzed papers, 47 (77.0%) are noise-oblivious and only 14 (23.0%) explicitly engage with noise-related execution concerns, while only 11 (18.0%) report evaluation on physical hardware or a noisy simulator. Test generation, the largest paradigm, exhibits a noise-awareness rate of only 14.3%, and debugging and repair 18.2%; coverage-based, metamorphic, and differential testing contain no noise-aware contributions. Noise-aware methodologies emerged late and remain outnumbered in all analyzed years. Framing and evaluation are strongly associated (odds ratio 40.5, p < 0.001) yet diverge for individual papers: 5 of the 14 noise-aware papers evaluate only on ideal simulators. Inferential statistical tests are reported in only 16.4% of papers. The classification framework was validated against a blinded, human-coded reference sample, achieving almost perfect inter-rater agreement on testing-technique classification and substantial agreement on noise-awareness. The framework provides a reusable empirical basis for longitudinal analysis of hardware-conscious testing practice.
Quantum Computing (QC) promises computational speedup over classic computing. However, noise exists in near-term quantum computers. Quantum software testing (for gaining confidence in quantum software's correctness) is inevitably impacted by noise, i.e., it is impossible to know if a test case failed due to noise or real faults. Existing testing techniques test quantum programs without considering noise, i.e., by executing tests on ideal quantum computer simulators. Consequently, they are not directly applicable to test quantum software on real quantum computers or noisy simulators. Thus, we propose a noise-aware approach (namedQOIN) to alleviate the noise effect on test results of quantum programs.QOINemploys machine learning techniques (e.g., transfer learning) to learn the noise effect of a quantum computer and filter it from a program's outputs. Such filtered outputs are then used as the input to perform test case assessments (determining the passing or failing of a test case execution against a test oracle). We evaluatedQOINon IBM's 23 noise models, Google's two available noise models, and Rigetti's Quantum Virtual Machine, with six real-world and 800 artificial programs. We also generated faulty versions of these programs to check if a failing test case execution can be determined under noise. Results show thatQOINcan reduce the noise effect by more than80%on most noise models. We used an existing test oracle to evaluateQOIN's effectiveness in quantum software testing. The results showed thatQOINattained scores of99%,75%, and86%for precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively, for the test oracle across six real-world programs. For artificial programs,QOINachieved scores of93%,79%, and86%for precision, recall, and F1-score respectively. This highlightsQOIN's effectiveness in learning noise patterns for noise-aware quantum software testing.
Quantum software testing is essential for the quality assurance of quantum programs. However, existing techniques face many challenges, such as constructing test oracles and distinguishing genuine faults from noise-induced errors. Propertybased testing is a promising solution for dealing with the test oracle issue, which verifies general properties rather than requiring inputs and outputs. However, its effectiveness in noisy quantum environments has not been studied. To this end, we evaluate the feasibility of applying property-based testing in noisy quantum computers by integrating it with a state-of-the-art machine learning-based noise mitigation method called QOIN. Our results show that on average, QOIN mitigates noise for individual circuits, though it may introduce outliers. Crucially, this does not guarantee property preservation: we show that some properties align better with QOIN, while others remain closer under unmitigated noise. To address this, we apply a hybrid approach that selectively applies QOIN during property-based testing. We show that this hybrid approach improves alignment with the ideal execution and significantly reduces false positives in assertion outcomes across most executed mutants. This provides a solid foundation for applying property-based testing to noisy quantum systems.
Quantum software testing (QST) checks whether quantum programs behave according to their intended specifications. A key requirement for QST research is a benchmark that supports rigorous empirical evaluation on programs that are testable and better reflect current software development practices. However, existing studies heavily rely on small hard-coded or circuit-level benchmarks, while available quantum programs are scattered across repositories without clear selection criteria, which limits fair comparison and systematic reproducibility. To this end, we present Qolumbina, a benchmark infrastructure for controlled QST experiments on scalable quantum programs. Qolumbina curates 40 programs from open-source repositories, turns them into test-ready subjects through systematic selection, refactoring, specifications, test case examples, unit tests, and standardized interfaces. We also propose QST-oriented criteria to characterize quantum programs along functionality, output behavior, development complexity, and quantum-specific execution complexity. Using these criteria, our empirical study shows that Qolumbina covers diverse testing-relevant properties and supports scalability analysis beyond fixed-size circuit benchmarks. Through controlled experiments with two recent QST approaches, we demonstrate the feasibility of using Qolumbina for execution-cost and fault-detection studies, and highlight backend-dependent effects that can influence QST result interpretation.
Quantum computers in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era face significant challenges due to inherent noise and limited qubit coherence. Accurate fidelity evaluation of quantum states necessitates multiple repeated measurements to obtain statistical results. But determining the optimal number of measurements remains an open problem due to the dynamic, device-dependent nature of quantum noise. Existing methods either assume prior knowledge of the noise model or inherently employ a fixed measurement strategy, which limits their applicability in practical deployment scenarios. This paper presents AutoFid, an adaptive and noise-aware fidelity measurement framework that automatically determines the number of required tests based on circuit structure and hardware feedback. AutoFid models quantum circuits as Directed Acyclic Graphs and estimates structural complexity via random walks, enabling estimation of measurement effort. It further incorporates transpilation-aware features such as gate fidelity, depth inflation, and crosstalk to refine iteration budgets. During runtime, AutoFid dynamically samples fidelity results and employs an early stopping strategy based on confidence intervals to reduce redundant measurements while preserving accuracy guarantees. We evaluate AutoFid on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on real IBMQ hardware platforms. Experimental results show that AutoFid reduces measurement costs by more than 50% compared to both fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining fidelity bias below 0.01. Additional analysis using classical software testing metrics and ablation studies demonstrate its effectiveness, robustness, and adaptability across a wide range of quantum workloads.
Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) represent a promising direction within Quantum Machine Learning (QML), yet their realization on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices remains constrained by decoherence, gate imperfections, crosstalk, and readout errors. This study provides a systematic evaluation of noise effects and mitigation strategies in hybrid quantum neural networks (HQNNs). Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Digital Dynamical Decoupling (DDD), and Layerwise Richardson Extrapolation (LRE) are incorporated into end-to-end QNN training pipelines developed with PennyLane, simulated using Qiskit Aer noise models, and integrated with the Mitiq framework, while Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) is evaluated separately under depolarizing noise due to its computational cost. Experiments conducted on the Iris dataset with five representative noise channels show that the impact of noise and the effect of mitigation are strongly dependent on the noise model and its strength. The model maintains comparatively strong performance under phase-flip and phase-damping noise, while substantial degradation is observed under high depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise. Across the evaluated mitigation methods, the observed benefits remain limited and noise-dependent: ZNE, DDD, and LRE generally follow the same degradation trends as the unmitigated baseline, while PEC shows limited gains only in the low-noise depolarizing regime. These findings highlight the need for context-specific mitigation strategies to improve the robustness of QNNs in practical NISQ settings.