A software product line models the variability of highly configurable systems. Complete exploration of all valid configurations (the configuration space) is infeasible as it grows exponentially with the number of features in the worst case. In practice, few representative configurations are sampled instead, which may be used for software testing or hardware verification. Pseudo-randomness of modern computers introduces statistical bias into these samples. Quantum computing enables truly random, uniform configuration sampling based on inherently random quantum physical effects. We propose a method to encode the entire configuration space in a superposition and then measure one random sample. We show the method's uniformity over multiple samples and investigate its scale for different feature models. We discuss the possibilities and limitations of quantum computing for uniform random sampling regarding current and future quantum hardware.

翻译：软件产品线对高度可配置系统的可变性进行建模。由于配置数量随特征数量呈最坏情况下的指数增长，对所有有效配置（即配置空间）进行完整探索是不可行的。实践中，通常仅采样少数代表性配置，这些配置可用于软件测试或硬件验证。现代计算机的伪随机性会在这些样本中引入统计偏差。量子计算基于固有的量子物理随机效应，能够实现真正随机的均匀配置采样。我们提出一种方法，将整个配置空间编码为叠加态并测量单个随机样本。该方法验证了多次采样的均匀性，并针对不同特征模型研究了其扩展规模。我们讨论了量子计算在当前及未来量子硬件上实现均匀随机采样的可能性与局限性。