Debugging Energy-Efficiency Related Field Failures in Mobile Apps

Abstract

Debugging field failures can be a challenging task for app-developers. Insufficient or unreliable information, improper assumptions and multitude of devices (smartphones) being used, are just some of the many factors that may contribute to its challenges. In this work, we design and develop an open-source framework that helps to communicate, localize and patch energy consumption related field failures in Android apps. Our framework consists of two sets of automated tools: one for the app-user to precisely record and report field failures observed in real-life apps, and the other assists the developer by automatically localizing the reported defects and suggesting patch locations. More specifically, the tools on the developer’s side consist of an Eclipse-plugin that detects specific patterns of Android API calls that are indicative of energy-inefficient behavior. In our experiments with real-life apps we observed that our framework can localize defects in a short amount of time (~3 seconds), even for apps with thousands of lines-of-code. Additionally, the energy savings generated as a result of the patched defects are significant (observed energy savings of up to 29%). When comparing the patch locations suggested by our framework to the changes in the patched code from real-life app-repositories, we observed a significant correlation (changes suggested by our tool also appeared in the source-code commits where the reported defects were marked as fixed).