Introduction to Quantum Software Engineering

Ashis Kumar Mandal, Md Nadim, Chanchal Kumar Roy +2 more

Shaukat Ali, Tao Yue

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.

Ghanshyam Pathak Pathak

Iaakov Exman

Quantum Software, its engineering and its applications are becoming more and more indispensable components of the current knowledge baggage of researchers and industrial professionals. Given the continuous accelerating developments of Quantum Computing, and the vastness of available knowledge, one needs efficient methods to dedicate the limited available personal time to the correct choice of selective information. This Special Issue on “Quantum Computing and Software Engineering” offers a small, but diverse set of papers covering theoretical, practical software system design and a pragmatic survey of Quantum Software Engineering, being a map pointing to references of relevance, aiming to answer the issue of choice of selective information.

Manuel Serrano, Ricardo Pérez‐Castillo, Mario G. Piattini

Andriy Miranskyy

Quantum computing is increasingly practised through programming, yet most educational offerings emphasize algorithmic or framework-level use rather than software engineering concerns such as testing, abstraction, tooling, and lifecycle management. This paper reports on the design and first offering of a cross-listed undergraduate--graduate course that frames quantum computing through a software engineering lens, focusing on early-stage competence relevant to software engineering practice. The course integrates foundational quantum concepts with software engineering perspectives, emphasizing executable artifacts, empirical reasoning, and trade-offs arising from probabilistic behaviour, noise, and evolving toolchains. Evidence is drawn from instructor observations, supplemented by anonymous student feedback, a background survey, and inspection of student work. Instructor observations and inspected work artifacts indicated that students with little prior exposure could engage with quantum software engineering topics after foundational quantum concepts had been introduced using executable artifacts. The contribution is the systematic software engineering framing and sequencing of the course, its mixed-level assessment design, and practice-grounded lessons from an actual offering; the report does not estimate causal learning effects.