As we enter the new quantum age, tech giants like IBM, Google, and Microsoft are leading the way. But, there is a major challenge: we need to turn exciting quantum possibilities into real, practical tools. That's where Quantum Software Engineering (QSE) comes in, and it's why "Quantum Software Engineering: The next Evolution (QSE-NE)" workshop is proposed. This workshop is conducted to help guide this change. It aims to highlight the latest ideas in QSE and get people from different fields talking, from university researchers to big tech companies. Our main goals were to share new QSE methods, tools, and studies and to tackle the tough problems we face in developing quantum software. This workshop is all about setting the direction for the future of building quantum software, at a time when it is really crucial. More details can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/qse-ne/ home.
As we enter the new quantum age, tech giants like IBM, Google, and Microsoft are leading the way. But, there is a major challenge: we need to turn exciting quantum possibilities into real, practical tools. That's where Quantum Software Engineering (QSE) comes in, and it's why "Quantum Software Engineering: The next Evolution (QSE-NE)" workshop is proposed. This workshop is conducted to help guide this change. It aims to highlight the latest ideas in QSE and get people from different fields talking, from university researchers to big tech companies. Our main goals were to share new QSE methods, tools, and studies and to tackle the tough problems we face in developing quantum software. This workshop is all about setting the direction for the future of building quantum software, at a time when it is really crucial. More details can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/qse-ne/ home.
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.
Quantum Software Engineering (QSE) focuses on developing cost-effective quantum software for quantum computers. It is a relatively new area of research, with current studies primarily aimed at designing, developing, testing, and maintaining quantum software. Interest in QSE has been steadily increasing; thus, introducing this topic to the ICSE conference audience will further engage young researchers, senior researchers, and practitioners interested in QSE. This technical briefing will introduce quantum computing, followed by the QSE overview. It will then explore QSE in detail from various perspectives, including quantum software requirements engineering, modeling, coding, testing, and debugging. Overall, this technical briefing aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of QSE as well as future research directions.
The First Working Seminar on Quantum Software Engineering (WSQSE 2022) took place on December 15 and 16, 2022 in Innsbruck, Austria. An audience of 33 quantum computing and software engineering researchers and practitioners joined the two-day event. The workshop enabled us to foresee short-term and longterms perspectives of Quantum Software Engineering, as well as a set of requirements, issues, and challenges for architecting, programming, and testing Quantum Software Engineering applications. In this report, we provide the summary of the workshop, by reporting on the structure of the event and the main results coming from the sessions and working groups.
As quantum hardware continues to advance, and as specialized frameworks and languages for quantum systems emerge, Quantum Software Engineering has established itself as a crucial discipline for leveraging today's Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware platforms and enabling practical quantum applications. The International Workshop on Quantum Software Engineering (Q-SE) series has become a leading forum for showcasing the latest developments and findings in Q-SE. We present the contributions and discussions that occurred during the seventh edition of the workshop (Q-SE 2026), which took place during the 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026) on April 12, 2026, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The accepted papers covered different levels of quantum software engineering tasks, such as handling new versions of quantum frameworks, verifying runtime behavior of quantum programs, and modeling different aspects of quantum simulation. Additionally, contributions explored the skills demanded by the industry for quantum software testing, approaches to select services for running quantum tasks reliably and economically, and methods to exploit quantum application characteristics to reduce circuit size, depth, and noise.
Quantum computing has demonstrated the potential to solve computationally intensive problems more efficiently than classical methods. Many software engineering tasks, such as test case selection, static analysis, code clone detection, and defect prediction, involve complex optimization, search, or classification, making them candidates for quantum enhancement. In this paper, we introduce Quantum-Based Software Engineering (QBSE) as a new research direction for applying quantum computing to classical software engineering problems. We outline its scope, clarify its distinction from quantum software engineering (QSE), and identify key problem types that may benefit from quantum optimization, search, and learning techniques. We also summarize existing research efforts that remain fragmented. Finally, we outline a preliminary research agenda that may help guide the future development of QBSE, providing a structured and meaningful direction within software engineering.