论文标题
开源量子软件系统中的技术债务和故障:一项实证研究
Technical Debts and Faults in Open-source Quantum Software Systems: An Empirical Study
论文作者
论文摘要
量子计算是一个快速增长的领域,吸引了研究人员和软件开发人员的兴趣。在其众多开源工具的支持下,开发人员现在可以构建,测试或运行其量子算法。尽管已经对传统软件系统的维护实践进行了广泛的研究,但量子软件的维护仍然是一个新的研究领域,但要确保整个量子计算系统的质量的关键部分。在这项工作中,我们着手研究量子软件中技术债务的分布和演变及其与故障发生的关系。了解这些问题可以指导未来的量子开发,并为量子软件开发人员和研究人员更多关注的关键领域提供维护建议。在本文中,我们经验研究了118个从GitHub选择的开源量子项目。这些项目分为10个类别。我们发现,所研究的量子软件遭受了违反代码惯例,错误处理和代码设计的问题。我们还观察到代码设计,冗余代码或代码约定与量子软件中故障的发生之间存在统计学意义的相关性。
Quantum computing is a rapidly growing field attracting the interest of both researchers and software developers. Supported by its numerous open-source tools, developers can now build, test, or run their quantum algorithms. Although the maintenance practices for traditional software systems have been extensively studied, the maintenance of quantum software is still a new field of study but a critical part to ensure the quality of a whole quantum computing system. In this work, we set out to investigate the distribution and evolution of technical debts in quantum software and their relationship with fault occurrences. Understanding these problems could guide future quantum development and provide maintenance recommendations for the key areas where quantum software developers and researchers should pay more attention. In this paper, we empirically studied 118 open-source quantum projects, which were selected from GitHub. The projects are categorized into 10 categories. We found that the studied quantum software suffers from the issues of code convention violation, error-handling, and code design. We also observed a statistically significant correlation between code design, redundant code or code convention, and the occurrences of faults in quantum software.