Scenario-Based Analysis

Scenario-based analysis is an architecture evaluation method from classical software engineering ¹. It uses concrete usage scenarios for the system under design to verify whether the architecture can hold up to the requirements of its use cases.

In FullStaQD, we use this method to guide the design of our reference architecture. At the current stage of the reference architecture, the scenario-based analysis focuses on the building block and runtime view. An extension to include the deployment view is planned for the future. Additionally, we document the scenarios for other software architects to use them in the evaluation of their own quantum software architecture instantiations, and for ourselves to evaluate architectural decisions in future versions of our reference architecture.

Our set of scenarios was originally inspired by Carbonelli et al.'s work which presented three industrial usage scenarios for quantum computing. We have since adjusted our scenarios with the goal of covering a representative set ². Our analysis currently covers the following scenarios:

1. Quantum Simulation for Material Science, Chemistry and Physics
2. Quantum Cloud Services for Optimisation Problems
3. Collision Detection using Quantum Machine Learning