In this third edition of the former Quantum Software Engineering MeetUp (QSE), we invite researchers from the classical software engineering community and from quantum sciences to shape the future of this new interdisciplinary research area. The recently started DFG priority programme 2514 Quantum Software, Algorithms and Systems Concepts, Methods and Tools for the Quantum Software Stack makes quantum software engineering an emerging field of research.
In this third edition of the former Quantum Software Engineering MeetUp (QSE), we invite researchers from the classical software engineering community and from quantum sciences to shape the future of this new interdisciplinary research area. The recently started DFG priority programme 2514 Quantum Software, Algorithms and Systems Concepts, Methods and Tools for the Quantum Software Stack makes quantum software engineering an emerging field of research.
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 testing (QST) is an emerging research area within quantum software engineering (QSE) to ensure quantum software functional and non-functional correctness and dependability. Since quantum computers perform computations significantly differently than classical computing, testing quantum software running on these quantum computers also differs due to quantum computing's unique characteristics, e.g., entanglement and superposition. Due to the rising interest of the software engineering community in QSE, we will provide an introduction to QST. We will introduce quantum computing and its various principles, quantum software development as quantum circuits, and current QST literature, including a key set of techniques with examples. Finally, a set of future research challenges related to QST will be presented.
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 edition of the QuantumX track, held within the XXIX Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD 2025), brought together leading Spanish research groups working at the intersection of Quantum Computing and Software Engineering. The event served as a pioneering forum to explore how principles of software quality, governance, testing, orchestration, and abstraction can be adapted to the quantum paradigm. The presented works spanned diverse areas (from quantum service engineering and hybrid architectures to quality models, circuit optimization, and quantum machine learning), reflecting the interdisciplinary nature and growing maturity of Quantum Computing and Quantum Software Engineering. The track also fostered community building and collaboration through the presentation of national and Ibero-American research networks such as RIPAISC and QSpain, and through dedicated networking sessions that encouraged joint initiatives. Beyond reporting on the event, this article provides a structured synthesis of the contributions presented at QuantumX, identifies common research themes and engineering concerns, and outlines a set of open challenges and future directions for the advancement of Quantum Software Engineering. This first QuantumX track established the foundation for a sustained research community and positioned Spain as an emerging contributor to the European and global quantum software ecosystem.
With the advance of quantum computing, quantum software becomes critical for exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Recently, quantum software engineering (QSE) becomes an emerging area attracting more and more attention. However, it is not clear what are the challenges and opportunities of quantum computing facing the software engineering community. This work aims to understand the QSE-related challenges perceived by developers. We perform an empirical study on Stack Exchange forums where developers post-QSE-related questions & answers and Github issue reports where developers raise QSE-related issues in practical quantum computing projects. Based on an existing taxonomy of question types on Stack Overflow, we first perform a qualitative analysis of the types of QSE-related questions asked on Stack Exchange forums. We then use automated topic modeling to uncover the topics in QSE-related Stack Exchange posts and GitHub issue reports. Our study highlights some particularly challenging areas of QSE that are different from that of traditional software engineering, such as explaining the theory behind quantum computing code, interpreting quantum program outputs, and bridging the knowledge gap between quantum computing and classical computing, as well as their associated opportunities.