Identifying Bug Patterns in Quantum Programs

Abstract

Bug patterns are erroneous code idioms or bad coding practices that have been proved to fail time and time again, which are usually caused by the misunderstanding of a programming language's features, the use of erroneous design patterns, or simple mistakes sharing common behaviors. This paper identifies and categorizes some bug patterns in the quantum programming language Qiskit and briefly discusses how to eliminate or prevent those bug patterns. We take this research as the first step to provide an underlying basis for debugging and testing quantum programs.