Delta Debugging for Property-Based Regression Testing of Quantum Programs
Gabriel Pontolillo, Mohammad Reza Mousavi · 2024
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.