Some Size and Structure Metrics for Quantum Software

TL;DR

This paper introduces basic size and structure metrics for quantum software, enabling quantitative evaluation of quantum programs at different abstraction levels.

Contribution

It proposes the first set of metrics specifically designed to measure size and structure attributes of quantum software.

Findings

Metrics defined at multiple abstraction levels

Metrics facilitate evaluation from various viewpoints

Provides a foundation for further quantum software measurement research

Abstract

Quantum software plays a critical role in exploiting the full potential of quantum computing systems. As a result, it is drawing increasing attention recently. As research in quantum programming reaches maturity with a number of active research and practical products, software metric researchers need to focus on this new paradigm to evaluate it rigorously and quantitatively. As the first step, this paper proposes some basic metrics for quantum software, which mainly focus on measuring the size and structure of quantum software. These metrics are defined at different abstraction levels to represent various size and structure attributes in quantum software explicitly. The proposed metrics can be used to evaluate quantum software from various viewpoints.