Mutation Testing of Quantum Programs Written in QISKit

There is an inherent lack of knowledge and technology to test a quantum program properly. In this paper, building on the definition of syntactically equivalent quantum operations, we investigated a novel set of mutation operators to generate mutants based on qubit measurements and quantum gates. To ease the adoption of quantum mutation testing, we further discuss QMutPy, an extension of the well-known and fully automated open-source mutation tool MutPy. To evaluate QMutPy’s performance we conducted a case study on 11 real quantum programs written in the IBM’s QISKit library. QMutPy has proven to be an effective quantum mutation tool, providing insight on the current state of quantum tests.