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.
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.
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.
As quantum computing transitions from a theoretical domain to a practical technology, many aspects of established practice in software engineering are being faced with new challenges. Quantum Software Engineering has been developed to address the peculiar needs that arise with quantum systems’ dependable, scalable, and fault-tolerant software development. The present paper critically reviews how traditional software engineering methodologies can be reshaped to fit into the quantum field. This also entails providing some critical contributions: frameworks to integrate classical and quantum systems, new error mitigation techniques, and the development of quantum-specific testing and debugging tools. In this respect, best practices have been recommended to ensure that future quantum software can harness the evolving capabilities of quantum hardware with continued performance, reliability, and scalability. The work is supposed to act as a foundational guide for the researcher and developer as quantum computing approaches widespread scientific and industrial adoption.
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 computing is no longer only a scientific interest but is rapidly becoming an industrially available technology that can potentially overcome the limits of classical computation. Over the last years, all major companies have provided frameworks and programming languages that allow developers to create their quantum applications. This shift has led to the definition of a new discipline called quantum software engineering, which is demanded to define novel methods for engineering large-scale quantum applications. While the research community is successfully embracing this call, we notice a lack of systematic investigations into the state of the practice of quantum programming. Understanding the challenges that quantum developers face is vital to precisely define the aims of quantum software engineering. Hence, in this paper, we first mine all the GitHub repositories that make use of the most used quantum programming frameworks currently on the market and then conduct coding analysis sessions to produce a taxonomy of the purposes for which quantum technologies are used. In the second place, we conduct a survey study that involves the contributors of the considered repositories, which aims to elicit the developers' opinions on the current adoption and challenges of quantum programming. On the one hand, the results highlight that the current adoption of quantum programming is still limited. On the other hand, there are many challenges that the software engineering community should carefully consider: these do not strictly pertain to technical concerns but also socio-technical matters.
Despite the increasing interest in quantum computing, the aspect of development to achieve cost-effective and reliable quantum software applications has been slow. One barrier is the software engineering of quantum programs, which can be approached from two directions. On the one hand, many software engineering practices, debugging in particular, are bound to classical computing. On the other hand, quantum programming is closely associated with the phenomena of quantum physics, and consequently, the way we express programs resembles the early days of programming. Moreover, much of the software engineering research today focuses on agile development, where computing cycles are cheap and new software can be rapidly deployed and tested, whereas in the quantum context, executions may consume lots of energy, and test runs may require lots of work to interpret. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap by starting with the quantum computing workflow and by mapping existing software engineering research to this workflow. Based on the mapping, we then identify directions for software engineering research for quantum computing.
Quantum computing is becoming a reality, and quantum software engineering (QSE) is emerging as a new discipline to enable developers to design and develop quantum programs. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the current state of QSE research, aiming to identify the most investigated topics, the types and number of studies, the main reported results, and the most studied quantum computing tools/frameworks. Additionally, the study aims to explore the research community’s interest in QSE, how it has evolved, and any prior contributions to the discipline before its formal introduction through the Talavera Manifesto. We searched for relevant articles in several databases and applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to select the most relevant studies. After evaluating the quality of the selected resources, we extracted relevant data from the primary studies and analyzed them. We found that QSE research has primarily focused on software testing, with little attention given to other topics, such as software engineering management. The most commonly studied technology for techniques and tools is Qiskit, although, in most studies, either multiple or none specific technologies were employed. The researchers most interested in QSE are interconnected through direct collaborations, and several strong collaboration clusters have been identified. Most articles in QSE have been published in non-thematic venues, with a preference for conferences. The study’s implications are providing a centralized source of information for researchers and practitioners in the field, facilitating knowledge transfer, and contributing to the advancement and growth of QSE.