Navigating the Socio-Technical Complexity Challenge in Quantum Software Ecosystems
For quantum software practitioners and organizations, this framework provides a principled approach to managing environment complexity, but the contribution is incremental as it synthesizes existing concepts without empirical validation.
The paper addresses the challenge of navigating fragmented quantum computing environments by proposing a socio-technical framework with three constructs (gravity wells, their properties, and socio-technical desiderata) to guide practitioners in making context-aware choices. The framework is developed using Design Science Research and evaluated through exemplary cases.
Quantum computing environments are composed of heterogeneous layers spanning hardware, software development kits, and applications. Practitioners curating these environments face a fragmented and rapidly evolving landscape with few principled guides for navigation. This paper presents a framework for evaluating quantum computing environment choices through a socio-technical lens, developed using Design Science Research methodology. Drawing on the quantum software engineering literature as well as organizational and socio-technical research, the framework introduces three analytical constructs: gravity wells and their properties, which characterize how certain technologies and structural conditions exert increasing pull on surrounding environment choices, and socio-technical desiderata, which articulate the normative goals against which those pulls can be evaluated. The framework supports practitioners in making deliberate, context-aware environment choices that preserve architectural flexibility and support the evolutionary development of the field. Demonstration and evaluation of the framework is conducted through exemplary cases. The contribution advances both the theory of quantum ecosystems and the practical guidance available to organizations and practitioners navigating the current, evolving field of quantum computing.