Energy-Aware Mutation Testing Framework for Android

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 MuDroid, that can be used by developers to assess the adequacy of their test suite for revealing energy-related defects. MuDroid 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 94.6%, thereby making it possible to apply MuDroid automatically.

Approach Overview

Our framework for energy-aware mutation testing of Android apps, consisting of three major components: (1) Eclipse Plugin that implements the mutation operators and creates a mutant from the original app; (2) Runner/Profiler component that runs the test suite over both the mutated and original versions of the program, profiles the power consumption of the device during execution of tests, and generates the corresponding power traces (i.e., time series of profiled power values); and (3) Analysis Engine that compares the power traces of tests in the original and mutated versions to determine if a mutant can be killed by tests or not.

Tool and Artifacts

Files are protected by password since the work is not published yet. The password is the starting word of subsection III-G (case sensitive)
The detailed list of mutation operators with coding examples can be downloaded from here.
The plugin is available for download from here.
Test suite of subject apps used in evaluation can be found here.