  With the advance in quantum computing, quantum software becomes critical for
exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Recently, quantum
software engineering (QSE) becomes an emerging area attracting more and more
attention. However, it is not clear what are the challenges and opportunities
of quantum computing facing the software engineering community. This work aims
to understand the QSE-related challenges perceived by developers. We perform an
empirical study on Stack Exchange forums where developers post-QSE-related
questions & answers and Github issue reports where developers raise QSE-related
issues in practical quantum computing projects. Based on an existing taxonomy
of question types on Stack Overflow, we first perform a qualitative analysis of
the types of QSE-related questions asked on Stack Exchange forums. We then use
automated topic modeling to uncover the topics in QSE-related Stack Exchange
posts and GitHub issue reports. Our study highlights some particularly
challenging areas of QSE that are different from that of traditional software
engineering, such as explaining the theory behind quantum computing code,
interpreting quantum program outputs, and bridging the knowledge gap between
quantum computing and classical computing, as well as their associated
opportunities.
