Property-Based Testing and Delta Debugging for Quantum Programs

サーラ アイマノ ファトヒ モハメド メトワリ, Sara Ayman Metwalli

Nan Jiang, Zichen Wang, Jian Wang

Macario Polo, Manuel Serrano, Ignacio García‐Rodríguez de Guzmán

Gabriel Pontolillo, Mohammad Reza Mousavi

Manually debugging quantum programs is a difficult and time-intensive process. In this paper, we introduce an automated debugging technique, based on delta debugging and property-based testing, for quantum programs. Our technique automatically identifies the changes made within an update to a quantum program that cause a property-based regression test to fail. To evaluate our technique, we inject faults and semantic preserving changes into three quantum algorithms. We discuss the viability and efficacy of our approach after measuring the percentage of faults and semantic preserving changes. Our results indicate that our method has a high true positive (called sensitivity) and true negative rate (called specificity) and is robust in terms of the amount of changes introduced to the program. Moreover, the sensitivity of the method increases significantly with the number of properties. While the specificity remains stable when increasing the number of properties and inputs.

Damian Rovara, Lukas Burgholzer, Robert Wille

As new advancements in the field of quantum computing lead to the development of increasingly complex programs, approaches to validate and debug these programs are becoming more important. To this end, methods employed in classical debugging, such as assertions for testing specific properties of a program's state, have been adapted for quantum programs. However, to efficiently debug quantum programs, it is key to properly place these assertions. This usually requires a deep understanding of the program's underlying mathematical properties, constituting a time-consuming manual task for developers. To address this problem, this work proposes methods for automatically refining assertions in quantum programs by moving them to more favorable positions in the program or by placing new assertions that help to further narrow down potential error locations. This allows developers to take advantage of rich and expressive assertions that greatly improve the debugging experience without requiring them to place these assertions manually in an otherwise tedious manner. An opensource implementation of the proposed methods is available at https://github.com/cda-tum/mqt-debugger.

Antonio García de la Barrera, Manuel Serrano, Ignacio García‐Rodríguez de Guzmán +2 more