12 Methods and tools to improve quantum software quality: a survey
Mahsa Radnejad, Khushdeep Kaur, Houbing Herbert Song, Lei Zhang · 2024
With recent breakthroughs in quantum computing, it has become a coming reality instead of a promising future. Quantum computing applications offer revolutionary potential across multiple domains including artificial intelligence (AI), optimization, healthcare, energy, and space, known as quantum advantage. The power of quantum computing relies on novel quantum algorithms, quantum software, and hardware. Unlike classical software, quantum software has unique features because of quantum mechanics such as superposition and noncloning. This opens a new research field - quantum software engineering (QSE). While the software engineering (SE) research community became aware of this need in 2019, we noticed the lack of a comprehensive investigation of state-of-the-art technologies and tools to improve quantum software quality. Testing and debugging are the two most efficient approaches to assure software quality in classical SE. In QSE, testing and debugging quantum programs become challenging due to quantum mechanics. While we can leverage some best practices from the classical world, new techniques and tools are needed to address the concerns in QSE. In this chapter, we first conduct a survey study of the state-of-the-art technologies and tools for testing and debugging quantum software. This study includes but is not limited to quantum bug pattern analysis and detection, quantum software testing techniques and classification, and quantum debugging techniques. In the second place, we provide our visions and insights of testing and debugging quantum software in terms of challenges and opportunities for improving quantum software quality. This survey has the potential to foster a research community committed to developing novel methods and tools for QSE.