Quantum software

Jose Garcia-Alonso, Majid Haghparast, Tommi Mikkonen +2 more

Quantum software engineering has gained a lot of attention recently. Multiple traditional software engineering events have introduced a quantum software track, or a co-located quantum related workshop or other side event, indicating that quantum software is becoming a popular research topic, with more and more software engineering researchers contributing to its evolution. In this paper, we address software engineering research that aims at solving problems that emerge when quantum programs are used on industry domains. The paper is based on the keynote at the IEEE Symposium on Quantum Software: Quantum Software Engineering 2025, which took place in Helsinki, Finland, Summer of 2025. In particular, we address the state of research in quantum software engineering, its novel aspects as well as its connections to other branches of software engineering. Furthermore, in the light of this research, we also assess the maturity of quantum software engineering in the light of industry expectations.

Harry Buhrman, Floor van de Pavert

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.

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

John P. Preskill

Tao Yue, Shaukat Ali, Paolo Arcaini

Quantum software engineering (QSE) is receiving increasing attention, as evidenced by increasing publications on topics, e.g., quantum software modeling, testing, and debugging. However, in the literature, quantum software requirements engineering (QSRE) is still a software engineering area that is relatively less investigated. To this end, in this paper, we provide an initial set of thoughts about how requirements engineering for quantum software might differ from that for classical software after making an effort to map classical requirements classifications (e.g., functional and extra-functional requirements) into the context of quantum software. Moreover, we provide discussions on various aspects of QSRE that deserve attention from the Quantum software engineering community.