Detecting and Diagnosing Energy Issues for Mobile Applications
Energy efficiency is an important criterion to judge the quality of mobile apps, but one third of our randomly sampled apps suffer from energy issues that can quickly drain battery power. To understand these issues, we conducted an empirical study on 27 well-maintained apps such as Chrome and Firefox, whose issue tracking systems are publicly accessible. Our study revealed that the main root causes of energy issues include unnecessary workload and excessively frequent operations. Surprisingly, these issues are beyond the application of present technology on energy issue detection. We also found that 25.0% of energy issues can only manifest themselves under specific contexts such as poor network performance, but such contexts are again neglected by present technology. Therefore, we proposed a novel testing framework for detecting energy issues in real-world mobile apps. Our framework examines apps with well-designed input sequences and runtime contexts. To identify the root causes mentioned above, we employed a machine learning algorithm to cluster the workloads and further evaluate their necessity. For the issues concealed by the specific contexts, we carefully set up several execution contexts to catch them. More importantly, we designed leading edge technology, e.g. pre-designing input sequences with potential energy overuse and tuning tests on-the-fly, to achieve high efficacy in detecting energy issues. A large-scale evaluation shows that 91.6% issues detected in our test were previously unknown to developers. On average, these issues double the energy costs of the apps. Our test achieves a low number of false positives. Finally, we show how our test reports can help developers fix the issues.
Mon 20 JulDisplayed time zone: Tijuana, Baja California change
14:50 - 15:50 | MOBILE APPS Technical Papers at Zoom Chair(s): Elena Sherman Boise State University Public Live Stream/Recording. Registered participants should join via the Zoom link distributed in Slack. | ||
14:50 20mTalk | Detecting and Diagnosing Energy Issues for Mobile Applications Technical Papers Xueliang Li Shenzhen University, Yuming Yang Shenzhen University, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, John P. Gallagher Roskilde University, Kaishun Wu Shenzhen University DOI Media Attached | ||
15:10 20mTalk | Automated Classification of Actions in Bug Reports of Mobile Apps Technical Papers Hui Liu Beijing Institute of Technology, Mingzhu Shen Beijing Institute of Technology, Jiahao Jin , Yanjie Jiang Beijing Institute of Technology DOI Media Attached | ||
15:30 20mTalk | Data Loss Detector: Automatically Revealing Data Loss Bugs in Android Apps Technical Papers Oliviero Riganelli University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, Simone Paolo Mottadelli University of Milano-Bicocca, Claudio Rota University of Milano-Bicocca, Daniela Micucci University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, Leonardo Mariani University of Milano Bicocca Link to publication DOI Pre-print Media Attached |