μDroid: An Energy-Aware Mutation Testing Framework for Android

Abstract

The rising popularity of mobile apps deployed on battery-constrained devices underlines the need for effectively evaluating their energy properties. However, currently there is a lack of testing tools for evaluating the energy properties of apps. As a result, for energy testing, developers are relying on tests intended for evaluating the functional correctness of apps. Such tests may not be adequate for revealing energy defects and inefficiencies in apps. This paper presents an energy-aware mutation testing framework, called µDroid, that can be used by developers to assess the adequacy of their test suite for revealing energy-related defects. µDroid implements fifty energy-aware mutation operators and relies on a novel, automatic oracle to determine if a mutant can be killed by a test. Our evaluation on real-world Android apps shows the ability of proposed mutation operators for evaluating the utility of tests in revealing energy defects. Moreover, our automated oracle can detect whether tests kill the energy mutants with an overall accuracy of 94%, thereby making it possible to apply µDroid automatically.