A framework for detecting energy bugs in smartphones

The proliferation of smartphones is retarded by energy inefficient applications and energy bugs. These energy bugs severely impact the user experience and cause significant user frustrations. To detect energy bugs, we need to characterize the power consumption behaviour of software. To achieve that, we develop an operational definition of energy bugs that can be easily translated to a procedure to detect them in smartphones. We integrate the proposed definition with a diagnostic framework to provide a step-by-step procedure for application developers. Using the proposed testing framework, we can investigate the existence of energy bugs when apps or platforms evolve. We validate the proposed framework with experiments and realistic energy bug examples. The results show that there are energy bugs across different versions of the same app as well as across different versions of the same smartphone.