QSoftCore: A Conceptual Foundation for Quantum Software Engineering
Abstract
Quantum software engineering (QSE) requires understanding application requirements, quantum programs and algorithms, quantum computation paradigms, executions, and deployment. However, relevant quantum computing (QC) concepts are often defined across physical, mathematical, and paradigm-specific levels of abstraction, making it difficult for the QSE community and hence proposed methods to refer to them consistently. To this end, we present QSoftCore, a conceptual model that reorganizes established QC concepts from a software engineering perspective and connects quantum applications, computational problems, algorithms, configurations, programs, and paradigm-specific computation specifications with state evolution, execution results, and backends. Our assessment against QSE literature across key software engineering activities indicates that QSoftCore provides shared QC referents for quantum computations, executions, deployment configurations, backends, and measurement evidence across the QSE lifecycle.
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BibTeX
@misc{yue2026qsoftcore,
title = {{QSoftCore: A Conceptual Foundation for Quantum Software Engineering}},
author = {Tao Yue and Yuechen Li and Man Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.39406},
eprint = {2610.39406},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39406},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - QSoftCore: A Conceptual Foundation for Quantum Software Engineering
AU - Tao Yue
AU - Yuechen Li
AU - Man Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.39406
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39406
AB - Quantum software engineering (QSE) requires understanding application requirements, quantum programs and algorithms, quantum computation paradigms, executions, and deployment. However, relevant quantum computing (QC) concepts are often defined across physical, mathematical, and paradigm-specific levels of abstraction, making it difficult for the QSE community and hence proposed methods to refer to them consistently. To this end, we present QSoftCore, a conceptual model that reorganizes established QC concepts from a software engineering perspective and connects quantum applications, computational problems, algorithms, configurations, programs, and paradigm-specific computation specifications with state evolution, execution results, and backends. Our assessment against QSE literature across key software engineering activities indicates that QSoftCore provides shared QC referents for quantum computations, executions, deployment configurations, backends, and measurement evidence across the QSE lifecycle.
ER -