Verification and Validation of Quantum Software
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Quantum software—like classic software—needs to be designed, specified, developed, and, most importantly, tested by developers. Writing tests is a complex, error-prone, and time-consuming task. Due to the particular properties of quantum physics (e.g., superposition), quantum software is inherently more complex to develop and effectively test than classical software. Nevertheless, some preliminary works have tried to bring commonly used classical testing practices for quantum computing to assess and improve the quality of quantum programs. In this chapter, we first gather 16 quantum software testing techniques that have been proposed for the IBM quantum framework, Qiskit. Then, whenever possible, we illustrate the usage of each technique (through the proposed tool that implements it, if available) on a given running example. We showcase that although several works have been proposed to ease the burn of testing quantum software, we are still in the early stages of testing in the quantum world. Researchers should focus on delivering artifacts that are usable without much hindrance to the rest of the community, and the development of quantum benchmarks should be a priority to facilitate reproducibility, replicability, and comparison between different testing techniques.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".