A Methodological Analysis of Empirical Studies in Quantum Software Testing

arXiv:2601.08367 · quant-ph, cs.SE · Submitted 2026-01-13 · Read on arXiv

quant-ph, cs.SE

Submitted: 2026-01-13

Updated: 2026-04-13

Code: https://github.com/NahidaNahida/QST-empirical-study

Project page: https://qiskit.github.io/qiskit-aer/apidocs/aer_provider.html

Terminology

• Software Engineering — 75× in this paper
• Quantum Software Testing — 42× in this paper
• Benchmark — 35× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Quantum Circuits — 26× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Quantum Computing — 20× in this paper
• Ablation — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering — 6× in this paper
• Quantum Fourier Transform — 6× in this paper
• Abstraction — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 5× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fidelity — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Ablation Studies — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 4× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Entanglement — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 4× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Hilbert Space — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Output Probability Oracle — 4× in this paper
• Classical Software Testing — 3× in this paper
• Process tomography — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Wrong Output Oracle — 3× in this paper
• Benchmarking — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Dominant Output Oracle — 2× in this paper
• Generalizability — 2× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering — 2× in this paper
• Property-Based Oracle — 2× in this paper
• Quantum State Oracle — 2× in this paper
• Search-Based Software Engineering — 2× in this paper
• State Of The Art — 2× in this paper
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• China Scholarship Council — 1× in this paper
• Classical Software Engineering — 1× in this paper
• Clustering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Combinatorial Optimization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Curse of Dimensionality — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• F1 Score — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fingerprinting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Formal Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative AI — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Methodological Rigor — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Multi-Agent System — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum — 1× in this paper
• Objective Function — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Parameter Shift Rule — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Quantum Operation Oracle — 1× in this paper
• Quantum Physics — 1× in this paper · explained in 10 episodes
• Redundancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Selection Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository12 — 1× in this paper

Sources

• PennyLane: Automatic differentiation of hybrid quantum-classical computations
• VeriQBench: A Benchmark for Multiple Types of Quantum Circuits
• Equivalent Quantum Circuits
• QEF: Reproducible and Exploratory Quantum Software Experiments
• QCRMut: Quantum Circuit Random Mutant generator tool
• The Heisenberg Representation of Quantum Computers
• Evaluating Mutation-based Fault Localization for Quantum Programs
• NovaQ: Improving Quantum Program Testing through Diversity-Guided Test Case Generation
• Context-Aware Unit Testing for Quantum Subroutines
• QUT: A Unit Testing Framework for Quantum Subroutines
• Proq: Projection-based Runtime Assertions for Debugging on a Quantum Computer
• Testing Quantum Programs with Multiple Subroutines
• A Black-box Testing Framework for Oracle Quantum Programs
• Ablation Studies in Artificial Neural Networks
• The Cost of Certainty: Shot Budgets in Quantum Program Testing
• On the Feasibility of Quantum Unit Testing
• Quantum Algorithms
• Bloch Vector Assertions for Debugging Quantum Programs
• A Survey on Testing and Analysis of Quantum Software
• QuCheck: A Property-based Testing Framework for Quantum Programs in Qiskit

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• Encrypted clones can leak: Classification of informative subsets in Quantum Encrypted Cloning
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• Theory of quantum-enhanced interferometry with general Markovian light sources
• A convergent hierarchy of spectral gap certificates for qubit Hamiltonians
• Universal Bound and Phase Transition in Many-Body Fermionic Non-Gaussianity