The implementation of quantum algorithms is attracting a lot of attention from the research community, mainly due to the technical advances made and the democratization of access to quantum computers. However, it is important for researchers and practitioners to learn from the methodologies of the classical-computing world in order to ensure the completeness, correctness, and validation of the produced software. Arguably, taking the right steps would contribute to the correct progress of this still-young field, aiming not to lose the attraction of the industry. With this motivation in mind, we provide in this paper a brief review of tools currently available to cope with the testing of quantum software. As part of this review, we have also detected possible gaps and opportunities that could be useful for the current community.
The implementation of quantum algorithms is attracting a lot of attention from the research community, mainly due to the technical advances made and the democratization of access to quantum computers. However, it is important for researchers and practitioners to learn from the methodologies of the classical-computing world in order to ensure the completeness, correctness, and validation of the produced software. Arguably, taking the right steps would contribute to the correct progress of this still-young field, aiming not to lose the attraction of the industry. With this motivation in mind, we provide in this paper a brief review of tools currently available to cope with the testing of quantum software. As part of this review, we have also detected possible gaps and opportunities that could be useful for the current community.
Quantum software testing concentrates on testing quantum programs to discover quantum faults in the programs cost-effectively. Given the foundations in quantum mechanics, the way quantum computations are performed is significantly different than classical computing. Therefore, quantum software testing also differs from classical software testing. There has been quite an interest in building quantum software testing techniques since 2019 in the software engineering (SE) community. Thus, we aim to introduce quantum software testing to the SE community. In particular, we will present the basic foundations of quantum computing and quantum programming as circuits, followed by the current state of the art on quantum software testing. Next, we will present some basic quantum software testing techniques and finally give the research directions that deserve attention from the SE community.
While recent progress in quantum hardware open the door for significant speedup in certain key areas (cryptography, biology, chemistry, optimization, machine learning, etc), quantum algorithms are still hard to implement right, and the validation of such quantum programs is achallenge. Moreover, importing the testing and debugging practices at use in classical programming is extremely difficult in the quantum case, due to the destructive aspect of quantum measurement. As an alternative strategy, formal methods are prone to play a decisive role in the emerging field of quantum software. Recent works initiate solutions for problems occurring at every stage of the development process: high-level program design, implementation, compilation, etc. We review the induced challenges for an efficient use of formal methods in quantum computing and the current most promising research directions.
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.
Quantum computing is getting increasing interest from both academia and industry, and the quantum software landscape has been growing rapidly. The quantum software stack comprises quantum programs, implementing algorithms, and platforms like IBM Qiskit, Google Cirq, and Microsoft Q#, enabling their development. To ensure the reliability and performance of quantum software, various techniques for testing and analyzing it have been proposed, such as test generation, bug pattern detection, and circuit optimization. However, the large amount of work and the fact that work on quantum software is performed by several research communities, make it difficult to get a comprehensive overview of the existing techniques. In this work, we provide an extensive survey of the state of the art in testing and analysis of quantum software. We discuss literature from several research communities, including quantum computing, software engineering, programming languages, and formal methods. Our survey covers a wide range of topics, including expected and unexpected behavior of quantum programs, testing techniques, program analysis approaches, optimizations, and benchmarks for testing and analyzing quantum software. We create novel connections between the discussed topics and present them in an accessible way. Finally, we discuss key challenges and open problems to inspire future research.
Abstract Quantum software—like classic software—needs to be designed, specified, developed, and, most importantly, tested by developers. Writing tests is a complex, error-prone, and time-consuming task. Due to the particular properties of quantum physics (e.g., superposition), quantum software is inherently more complex to develop and effectively test than classical software. Nevertheless, some preliminary works have tried to bring commonly used classical testing practices for quantum computing to assess and improve the quality of quantum programs. In this chapter, we first gather 16 quantum software testing techniques that have been proposed for the IBM quantum framework, Qiskit. Then, whenever possible, we illustrate the usage of each technique (through the proposed tool that implements it, if available) on a given running example. We showcase that although several works have been proposed to ease the burn of testing quantum software, we are still in the early stages of testing in the quantum world. Researchers should focus on delivering artifacts that are usable without much hindrance to the rest of the community, and the development of quantum benchmarks should be a priority to facilitate reproducibility, replicability, and comparison between different testing techniques.
Quantum computing is the latest revolution in computing and will probably come to be seen as an advance as important as the steam engine or the information society. In the last few decades, our understanding of quantum computers has expanded and multiple efforts have been made to create languages, libraries, tools, and environments to facilitate their programming. Nonetheless, quantum computers are complex systems at the bottom of a stack of layers that programmers need to understand. Hence, efforts towards creating quantum programming languages and computing environments that can abstract low-level technology details have become crucial steps to achieve a useful quantum computing technology. However, most of these environments still lack many of the features that would be desirable, such as those outlined in The Talavera Manifesto for Quantum Software Engineering and Programming. For advancing quantum computing, we will need to develop quantum software engineering techniques and tools to ensure the feasibility of this new type of quantum software. To contribute to this goal, this paper provides a review of the main quantum software components and platforms. We also propose a set of quality requirements for the development of quantum software platforms and the conduct of their quality assessment.