A Search-Based Energy Testing Framework for Android

The utility of a smartphone is limited by its battery capacity and the ability of its hardware and software to efficiently use the device’s battery. To properly characterize the energy consumption of an app and identify energy defects, it is critical that apps are properly tested, i.e., analyzed dynamically to assess the app’s energy properties. However, currently there is a lack of testing tools for evaluating the energy properties of apps. We present COBWEB, a search-based energy testing technique for Android. By leveraging a set of novel models, representing both the functional behavior of an app as well as the contextual conditions affecting the app’s energy behavior, COBWEB generates a test suite that can effectively find energy defects.

How does Cobweb work?

COBWEB , consists of two major components: (1) Model Extractor component that derives the required models for test generation; and (2) Test Generator component that utilizes an evolutionary search-based technique to create system tests. COBWEB ’s fitness function rewards the tests based on two criteria: (1) how close they are to covering energy-greedy APIs in the application logic, and (2) how well they contribute to exercising different contextual factors.

Artifacts

The artifacts are available for download from here.

Publications

More details about can be found in our publication below:

• A Search-Based Energy Testing Framework for Android
  Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Jun-Wei Lin, and Sam Malek
  41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019), Montreal, Canada, May 2019. (21% acceptance rate)
  [PDF]