TL;DR: The mutation-generated faults and curated benchmarks long used to evaluate quantum software testing tools may be missing 86.3% of the bugs that actually show up in real quantum projects.
Title: Are We Testing the Wrong Quantum Bugs? A Study of Fault Representation Gaps in Quantum Software Testing
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Key points
๐ Collected 410 verified real-world bugs from 10 repositories (Qiskit, PennyLane, Cirq, and more), classified into 56 bug families
๐งฌ Mutation-testing tools only cover 20 of those families
๐ Curated benchmarks add just 15 more families
๐ Only 13.7% of real bugs fall into families represented by either source
๐งฉ The big missing categories: compiler transformation errors (66 bugs), type-handling errors (53), missing input validation (47)
โ๏ธ Most of these faults live in compilers, intermediate representations, and framework interactions, not in the circuits themselves, so circuit mutation alone can't reproduce them
The reminder that a correct circuit says nothing about a correct compilation feels like a lesson that reaches well beyond quantum software testing.
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QuantumComputing# #
SoftwareTesting#