Quantum Software Engineering Challenges from Developers' Perspective: Mapping Research Challenges to the Proposed Workflow Model

TL;DR

This paper explores the unique challenges of quantum software engineering from developers' perspectives, mapping existing research to a workflow model to identify future research directions in the field.

Contribution

It introduces a workflow-based mapping approach to align current software engineering research with quantum computing development challenges.

Findings

Identified gaps between classical and quantum software engineering practices.

Mapped existing research to a quantum computing workflow.

Proposed directions for future quantum software engineering research.

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest in quantum computing, the aspect of development to achieve cost-effective and reliable quantum software applications has been slow. One barrier is the software engineering of quantum programs, which can be approached from two directions. On the one hand, many software engineering practices, debugging in particular, are bound to classical computing. On the other hand, quantum programming is closely associated with the phenomena of quantum physics, and consequently, the way we express programs resembles the early days of programming. Moreover, much of the software engineering research today focuses on agile development, where computing cycles are cheap and new software can be rapidly deployed and tested, whereas in the quantum context, executions may consume lots of energy, and test runs may require lots of work to interpret. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap by starting with the quantum computing workflow and by mapping existing software engineering research to this workflow. Based on the mapping, we then identify directions for software engineering research for quantum computing.