A Comprehensive Study of Bug Fixes in Quantum Programs

As quantum programming evolves, more and more quantum programming languages are being developed. As a result, debugging and testing quantum programs have become increasingly important. While bug fixing in classical programs has come a long way, there is a lack of research in quantum programs. To thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) pp. 1239 - 1246
Main Authors Luo, Junjie, Zhao, Pengzhan, Miao, Zhongtao, Lan, Shuhan, Zhao, Jianjun
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2022
Subjects
Bug fixing
Computer bugs
Computer languages
Conferences
Debugging
empirical study
Programming
quantum program debugging
quantum software testing
Software
Testing
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Summary:As quantum programming evolves, more and more quantum programming languages are being developed. As a result, debugging and testing quantum programs have become increasingly important. While bug fixing in classical programs has come a long way, there is a lack of research in quantum programs. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive study on bug fixing in quantum programs. We collect and investigate 96 real-world bugs and their fixes from four popular quantum programming languages (Qiskit, Cirq, Q#, and ProjectQ). Our study shows that a high proportion of bugs in quantum programs are quantum-specific bugs (over 80%), which requires further research in the bug fixing domain. We also summarize and extend the bug patterns in quantum programs and subdivide the most critical part, math-related bugs, to make it more applicable to the study of quantum programs. Our findings summarize the characteristics of bugs in quantum programs and provide a basis for studying testing and debugging quantum programs.
DOI:10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00147