Quantum software testing at QCE26 met the reproducibility gap

This guide follows 22 talks from IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto on how to test quantum code and how to rerun quantum work. The tools grew sharper, and the records behind them stayed thin. On the last afternoon of IEEE Quantum Week 2026, in Room 713B, Nicole Hoess of the Technical University of Applied Sciences Regensburg reported what happened when their group tried to rerun other people’s quantum experiments. Of the 31 published code packages they could fetch, 11 would start. The paper took its title from an old programmers’ excuse, works on my machine, and swapped the machine for a QPU, a quantum processing unit. For quantum software testing the joke has an edge. The excuse every programmer has used now hides results that nobody else can check. Testing ordinary software rests on a simple move, running a program on an input and comparing its output with the answer you expected, and quantum programs break it. Their output is random, so a test must collect many runs, called shots, and compare the spread of results with statistics. Looking inside a running program destroys the state being examined, so no debugger can pause halfway. On real hardware, noise blurs…