Some Size and Structure Metrics for Quantum Software
This work addresses the need for rigorous evaluation in quantum computing, but it is incremental as it introduces foundational metrics without demonstrating broad impact.
The paper tackles the lack of quantitative evaluation methods for quantum software by proposing basic metrics to measure its size and structure at different abstraction levels, enabling assessment from various viewpoints.
Quantum software plays a critical role in exploiting the full potential of quantum computing systems. As a result, it is drawing increasing attention recently. As research in quantum programming reaches maturity with a number of active research and practical products, software metric researchers need to focus on this new paradigm to evaluate it rigorously and quantitatively. As the first step, this paper proposes some basic metrics for quantum software, which mainly focus on measuring the size and structure of quantum software. These metrics are defined at different abstraction levels to represent various size and structure attributes in quantum software explicitly. The proposed metrics can be used to evaluate quantum software from various viewpoints.