Quantum Software Components and Platforms: Overview and Quality Assessment

Abstract

Quantum computing is the latest revolution in computing and will probably come to be seen as an advance as important as the steam engine or the information society. In the last few decades, our understanding of quantum computers has expanded and multiple efforts have been made to create languages, libraries, tools, and environments to facilitate their programming. Nonetheless, quantum computers are complex systems at the bottom of a stack of layers that programmers need to understand. Hence, efforts towards creating quantum programming languages and computing environments that can abstract low-level technology details have become crucial steps to achieve a useful quantum computing technology. However, most of these environments still lack many of the features that would be desirable, such as those outlined in The Talavera Manifesto for Quantum Software Engineering and Programming. For advancing quantum computing, we will need to develop quantum software engineering techniques and tools to ensure the feasibility of this new type of quantum software. To contribute to this goal, this paper provides a review of the main quantum software components and platforms. We also propose a set of quality requirements for the development of quantum software platforms and the conduct of their quality assessment.