A Framework for the Automatic Execution of Measurement-based Experiments on Android Devices

Abstract

Conducting measurement-based experiments is fundamental for assessing the quality of Android apps in terms of, e.g., energy consumption, CPU, and memory usage. However, orchestrating such experiments is not trivial as it requires large boilerplate code, careful setup of measurement tools, and the adoption of various empirical best practices scattered across the literature. All together, those factors are slowing down the scientific advancement and harming experiments' replicability in the mobile software engineering area. In this paper we present Android Runner (AR), a framework for automatically executing measurement-based experiments on native and web apps running on Android devices. In AR, an experiment is defined once in a descriptive fashion, and then its execution is fully automatic, customizable, and replicable. AR is implemented in Python and it can be extended with third-party profilers. AR has been used in more than 25 scientific studies primarily targeting performance and energy efficiency.