Mutation Testing of Quantum Programs: A Case Study With Qiskit

Abstract

As quantum computing is still in its infancy, there is an inherent lack of knowledge and technology to test a quantum program properly. In the classical realm, mutation testing has been successfully used to evaluate how well a program's test suite detects seeded faults (i.e., mutants). In this paper, building on the definition of syntactically equivalent quantum operations, we propose a novel set of mutation operators to generate mutants based on qubit measurements and quantum gates. To ease the adoption of quantum mutation testing, we further propose QMutPy, an extension of the well-known and fully automated opensource mutation tool MutPy. To evaluate QMutPy's performance, we conducted a case study on 24 real quantum programs written in IBM's Qiskit library. Furthermore, we show how better test suite coverage and improvements to test assertions can increase the test suites' mutation score and quality. QMutPy has proven to be an effective quantum mutation tool, providing insight into the current state of quantum tests and how to improve them.

The Foundations of Quantum Computing and Their Relation to Software Engineering

“…RQ3: What are the supporting concepts for implementing Quantum Computing? Quantum computing as an engineering discipline is still in its infancy [62][63], and only some practical prototypes have been announced. Quantum hardware is going to be implemented, it is a clear objective [64]; the principal manufacturers are creating different technologies.…”

“…13 we show a classification of types of testing techniques for quantum software. It was extracted from [63,[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84], which treat specific techniques and tools for debugging and testing.…”

Development of a Tool for Finding Equivalent Mutants in Quantum Program: A Perspective to Measure the Quality of Quantum Software

“…Further, they called a sequence of gates semantically equivalent to another sequence by executing and comparing their measurement. Fortunato et al [30] carried out a case study on 24 quantum programs. They considered the concept of the syntactically equivalent gate.…”

The Language Shift of Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka in Hsinchu County and Hsinchu City, Taiwan: A Data Comparison of the Surveys of 1978 and 2015

“…Its flexibility ensures its utility across various quantum machine learning paradigms. Performance benchmarks of our simulator demonstrate that it achieves significant speedups, often exceeding tens of times, which are exponentially better than those achieved by state-of-the-art methods using Qiskit on CPUs [24]. Furthermore, it boasts scalability to multi-GPUs-a testament to the proficiency achieved by the NVIDIA Quantum Team-thereby affirming our simulator's role as a potent and scalable asset in the quantum machine learning arena and the Quantum-HPC ecosystem [21], [23].…”