Energy Metamorphic Testing for Android Applications

Abstract

A major requirement for portable battery-operated (IoT-related) devices is energy conservation. This concern has not been well noticed by the application developers, while many energy problems in such devices are due to programming errors. Energy testing to find energy bugs and hotspots has gained attention in the last few years, where a major challenge to do so is designing an effective test oracle. In this paper, we use the idea of metamorphic testing to tackle this problem. In metamorphic testing, the output of different scenarios are compared against each other to detect a test failure, whereas in traditional oracles, the output of each scenario is compared with an “expected” value. Applying our proposed metamorphic relations to test a number of Android applications, we found the effectiveness of our proposed approach in detection of the considered bugs and hotspots.