Bug Classification in Quantum Software: A Rule-Based Framework and Its Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rule-based framework for classifying bugs in quantum software, demonstrating its effectiveness through extensive evaluation and revealing insights into bug types and severity in quantum repositories.

Contribution

It presents a novel, tailored rule-based approach for quantum bug classification and provides a comprehensive evaluation on real-world quantum software issues.

Findings

Achieved up to 85.21% classification accuracy.

Classical bugs dominate at 67.2%, quantum-specific at 27.3%.

Most issues are low severity, with quantum circuit problems being prevalent.

Abstract

Accurate classification of software bugs is essential for improving software quality. This paper presents a rule-based automated framework for classifying issues in quantum software repositories by bug type, category, severity, and impacted quality attributes, with additional focus on quantum-specific bug types. The framework applies keyword and heuristic-based techniques tailored to quantum computing. To assess its reliability, we manually classified a stratified sample of 4,984 issues from a dataset of 12,910 issues across 36 Qiskit repositories. Automated classifications were compared with ground truth using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The framework achieved up to 85.21% accuracy, with F1-scores ranging from 0.7075 (severity) to 0.8393 (quality attribute). Statistical validation via paired t-tests and Cohen's Kappa showed substantial to almost perfect agreement for bug type (k = 0.696), category (k = 0.826), quality attribute (k = 0.818), and quantum-specific bug type (k = 0.712). Severity classification showed slight agreement (k = 0.162), suggesting room for improvement. Large-scale analysis revealed that classical bugs dominate (67.2%), with quantum-specific bugs at 27.3%. Frequent bug categories included compatibility, functional, and quantum-specific defects, while usability, maintainability, and interoperability were the most impacted quality attributes. Most issues (93.7%) were low severity; only 4.3% were critical. A detailed review of 1,550 quantum-specific bugs showed that over half involved quantum circuit-level problems, followed by gate errors and hardware-related issues.