A methodology for energy performance testing of smartphone applications

Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular among users. They are equipped with an enormous number of applications, and these applications drain the smartphones' batteries. Moreover, battery capacity is significantly restricted due to constraints on size and weight of the device. It is important for smartphone applications to be energy efficient. Thus, a methodology to conduct energy performance testing is needed for two reasons: (i) evaluate the power consumption of a single application on a given device; (ii) compare the power consumption of different smartphones or platforms running the same application. In our earlier work “Selection and execution of user level test cases for energy cost evaluation of smartphones” (Proceedings of the 6th AST, 2011), we have developed a testing methodology that significantly reduces the number of test cases. In addition, we have introduced the concepts of primary and standalone test configurations. However, ordering of the executions of those two kinds of tests is non-trivial, and it was not studied in that paper. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to interleave the identification of those two kinds of test configurations in order to reduce the total number of configurations. We express the methodology in the form of a detailed flow chart that application developers can easily follow. We apply the methodology to a specific smartphone, namely HTC Nexus One smartphone in order to illustrate the process of this methodology. We have shown that the total number of test configurations obtained by the given methodology is the same as the number predicted by numerical expressions.