AuthorsX. Wang, P. Arcaini, T. Yue and S. Ali
TitleGenerating Failing Test Suites for Quantum Programs with Search
AfilliationSoftware Engineering
Project(s)Department of Engineering Complex Software Systems, Quantum Software Engineering Project, Enabling Future Dependable Ubiquitous Services and Data with Novel Testing Methods for Quantum Programs
StatusPublished
Publication TypeProceedings, refereed
Year of Publication2021
Conference NameSymposium on Search Base Software Engineering 2021
Abstract

Testing quantum programs requires systematic, automated, and intelligent methods due to their inherent complexity, such as their superposition and entanglement. To this end, we present a search-based approach, called Quantum Search-Based Testing (QuSBT), for automatically generating test suites of a given size depending on available testing budget, with the aim of maximizing the number of failing test cases in the test suite. QuSBT consists of definitions of the problem encoding, failure types, test assessment with statistical tests, fitness function, and test case generation with a Genetic Algorithm (GA). To empirically evaluate QuSBT, we compared it with Random Search (RS) by testing six quantum programs. We assessed the effectiveness of QuSBT and RS with 30 carefully designed faulty versions of the six quantum programs. Results show that QuSBT provides a viable solution for testing quantum programs, and achieved a significant improvement over RS in 87% of the faulty programs, and no significant difference in the rest of 13% of the faulty programs.

URLhttps://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88106-1_2
DOI10.1007/978-3-030-88106-1_2
Citation Key42898