Energy-Aware Test-Suite Minimization for Android Apps

The rising popularity of mobile apps deployed on battery-constrained devices has motivated the need for effective energy-aware testing techniques. Energy testing is generally more labor intensive and expensive than functional testing, as tests need to be executed in the deployment environment, specialized equipment needs to be used to collect energy measurements, etc. Currently, there is a dearth of automatic mobile testing techniques that consider energy as a program property of interest. This paper presents an energy-aware test-suite minimization approach to significantly reduce the number of tests needed to eeffectively test the energy properties of an Android app. It relies on an energy-aware coverage criterion that indicates the degree to which energy-greedy parts of a program are tested. We describe and evaluate two complementary algorithms for test-suite reduction. Experiments over test suites provided for real-world apps have corroborated our ability to reduce the test suite size by 84% on average, while maintaining the effectiveness of test suite in revealing the great majority of energy bugs.