Understanding Quantum Software Engineering Challenges An Empirical Study on Stack Exchange Forums and GitHub Issues

TL;DR

This paper empirically investigates the unique challenges faced in quantum software engineering by analyzing questions and issues from Stack Exchange and GitHub, revealing key difficulties and opportunities in the emerging field.

Contribution

It provides a novel empirical analysis of QSE challenges through qualitative and topic modeling methods on real developer data, highlighting areas distinct from traditional software engineering.

Findings

Quantum explaining and interpretation challenges are prominent.

Knowledge gap between quantum and classical computing is significant.

Opportunities include improving understanding and bridging knowledge gaps.

Abstract

With the advance in quantum computing, quantum software becomes critical for exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Recently, quantum software engineering (QSE) becomes an emerging area attracting more and more attention. However, it is not clear what are the challenges and opportunities of quantum computing facing the software engineering community. This work aims to understand the QSE-related challenges perceived by developers. We perform an empirical study on Stack Exchange forums where developers post-QSE-related questions & answers and Github issue reports where developers raise QSE-related issues in practical quantum computing projects. Based on an existing taxonomy of question types on Stack Overflow, we first perform a qualitative analysis of the types of QSE-related questions asked on Stack Exchange forums. We then use automated topic modeling to uncover the topics in QSE-related Stack Exchange posts and GitHub issue reports. Our study highlights some particularly challenging areas of QSE that are different from that of traditional software engineering, such as explaining the theory behind quantum computing code, interpreting quantum program outputs, and bridging the knowledge gap between quantum computing and classical computing, as well as their associated opportunities.