TL;DR
This paper presents a large-scale empirical analysis of over 21,000 quantum software repositories on GitHub, revealing growth trends, development practices, and specific challenges in quantum software engineering.
Contribution
It provides the first comprehensive analysis of quantum software repository evolution, identifying key maintenance patterns and highlighting the need for specialized debugging tools.
Findings
200% increase in quantum repositories since 2017
Perfective commits dominate at 51.76%
34% of issues are quantum-specific
Abstract
Quantum computing is rapidly advancing, but quantum software development faces significant challenges, including a steep learning curve, high hardware error rates, and a lack of mature engineering practices. This study conducts a large-scale mining analysis of over 21,000 GitHub repositories, containing 1.2 million commits from more than 10,000 developers, to examine the evolution and maintenance of quantum software. We analyze repository growth, programming language and framework adoption, and contributor trends, revealing a 200% increase in repositories and a 150% rise in contributors since 2017. Additionally, we investigate software development and maintenance practices, showing that perfective commits dominate (51.76%), while the low occurrence of corrective commits (18.54%) indicates potential gaps in bug resolution. Furthermore, 34% of reported issues are quantum-specific,…
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