QCRMut: Quantum Circuit Random Mutant generator tool

Abstract

As quantum computing moves towards practical deployment, ensuring the reliability of quantum software becomes increasingly important. Mutation testing is a promising technique in this context; however, existing exhaustive mutation generators have primarily been developed for legacy versions of Qiskit (0.x), limiting their applicability to current stable releases. This work presents QCRMut, a mutation testing tool for quantum circuits compatible with stable Qiskit versions, which supports controlled preservation of circuit structure through immutable positions and enables efficient, representative random mutant generation as an alternative to exhaustive mutation. We develop QCRMut according to four design principles: unicity, similarity, representativity, and coverability. We evaluate the tool empirically by comparing mutation scores obtained from randomly sampled mutant subsets against those produced by exhaustive mutation over a benchmark suite of quantum circuits. We further analyse sensitivity to random seeds and apply statistical tests to assess the robustness of the observed differences. Finally, we compare QCRMut with existing mutation testing tools. Across the benchmark suite, randomly generated mutant subsets produced by QCRMut achieve mutation scores that are comparable to those obtained via exhaustive mutation. The results are stable across different random seeds and highlight practical limitations in existing approaches that are addressed by our method. Overall, QCRMut provides a practical and extensible solution for mutation testing of quantum circuits by combining compatibility with stable Qiskit releases, controlled structure preservation, statistically sound evaluation, and efficient mutant generation. In addition, it enables the mutation and analysis of circuits that cannot be handled by previous tools.