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 in:	2022 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
Language:	English
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
Online Access:	Get full text
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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