QST-empirical-study

This repository includes the data, documentation, and code for our (preprint) article entitled A Methodological Analysis of Empirical Studies in Quantum Software Testing. This article systematically conducts a methodological analysis of empirical studies in quantum software testing based on a pool of 59 primary studies.

Besides, we provide a long-term archive in Zenodo:

Data and Documentation

Raw Data for Systematic Literature Review

Our research methodology is based on a systematic literature review. Herein, we record the original literature collected from available digital databases and the manually annotated metadata for further analysis of research questions.

• literature_pool: We include the original literature through a keyword search in raw. The deduplicated literature pool is provided in merged.
• annotated_data: This file final_list.csv contains all the metadata with human annotation, where our discussions for bibliometric analysis and each research question completely rely on this file. Also, we document the candidate literature introduced from the keyword search and the snowballing search.

Generated Data

All the generated data are preserved in the folder build. It is worth noting that: the folder figures incorporates all the generated figures in the PDF format used in the main body of our article, and the folder tables contains all the generated LaTeX code that can be compiled to the tables displayed in our article.

Code

We provide the source code to generate the figures and tables mentioned above.

Getting Started

1. Use the following command to clone this repository.

   git clone https://github.com/NahidaNahida/QST-empirical-study.git

2. Create a virtual Conda environment.

   conda create --name qst_empirical python=3.11.13

3. Activate the environment.

   conda activate qst_empirical

4. Upon changing the directory to QST-empirical-study, download the required packages based on requirements.txt.

   conda install --file requirements.txt

Now, it is ready to run our code.

Implementation

We provide the run.bat file to reproduce the results of the bibliometric analysis and the ten research questions within one batch. Make sure the required source final_list.csv is located at the directory ./doc/annotated_data, then run the following command:

./run.bat

The corresponding results will be generated at the folders in build. All the source codes for data generation are offered in results.