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.

翻译：随着量子计算向实际部署迈进，确保量子软件的可靠性变得日益重要。在此背景下，变异测试是一种具有前景的技术；然而，现有的穷举变异体生成器主要针对Qiskit旧版本（0.x）开发，限制了其在当前稳定版本中的适用性。本文提出QCRMut，一种兼容稳定版Qiskit的量子电路变异测试工具，它通过不可变位置实现对电路结构的可控保留，并支持以高效、具有代表性的随机变异体生成作为穷举变异的替代方案。我们依据四项设计原则开发QCRMut：唯一性、相似性、代表性和可覆盖性。我们通过在一组量子电路基准测试集上比较从随机采样子集获得的变异评分与穷举变异产生的评分，对工具进行实证评估。我们进一步分析了其对随机种子的敏感性，并应用统计检验评估观察差异的稳健性。最后，我们将QCRMut与现有变异测试工具进行对比。在基准测试集上，QCRMut生成的随机变异体子集获得的变异评分与穷举变异所得结果相当。该结果在不同随机种子下保持稳定，并揭示了现有方法中的实际局限性，而这些局限性已被我们的方法解决。总体而言，QCRMut通过结合与稳定版Qiskit的兼容性、可控的结构保留、统计可靠的评估以及高效的变异体生成，为量子电路的变异测试提供了一种实用且可扩展的解决方案。此外，它能够对先前工具无法处理的电路进行变异与分析。