Quantum Computing Platforms: Assessing the Impact on Quality Attributes and SDLC Activities
This work addresses the challenge for software engineers in adapting to quantum computing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SE principles applied to a new domain.
The paper examines quantum computing platforms from a software engineering perspective, identifying their characteristics and proposing a general architecture and programming model, and finds that while useful for specialized applications like scientific computing, they negatively impact most quality attributes such as maintainability and reliability.
Practical quantum computing is rapidly becoming a reality. To harness quantum computers' real potential in software applications, one needs to have an in-depth understanding of all such characteristics of quantum computing platforms (QCPs), relevant from the Software Engineering (SE) perspective. Restrictions on copying, deletion, the transmission of qubit states, a hard dependency on quantum algorithms are few, out of many, examples of QCP characteristics that have significant implications for building quantum software. Thus, developing quantum software requires a paradigm shift in thinking by software engineers. This paper presents the key findings from the SE perspective, resulting from an in-depth examination of state-of-the-art QCPs available today. The main contributions that we present include i) Proposing a general architecture of the QCPs, ii) Proposing a programming model for developing quantum software, iii) Determining architecturally significant characteristics of QCPs, and \textbf{iv)} Determining the impact of these characteristics on various Quality Attributes (QAs) and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) activities. We show that the nature of QCPs makes them useful mainly in specialized application areas such as scientific computing. Except for performance and scalability, most of the other QAs (e.g., maintainability, testability, and reliability) are adversely affected by different characteristics of a QCP.