  High energy consumption is a challenging issue that an ever increasing number
of mobile applications face today. However, energy consumption is being tested
in an ad hoc way, despite being an important non-functional requirement of an
application. Such limitation becomes particularly disconcerting during software
testing: on the one hand, developers do not really know how to measure energy;
on the other hand, there is no knowledge as to what is the energy overhead
imposed by the testing framework. In this paper, as we evaluate eight popular
mobile UI automation frameworks, we have discovered that there are automation
frameworks that increase energy consumption up to roughly 2200%. While limited
in the interactions one can do, Espresso is the most energy efficient
framework. However, depending on the needs of the tester, Appium, Monkeyrunner,
or UIAutomator are good alternatives. In practice, results show that deciding
which is the most suitable framework is vital. We provide a decision tree to
help developers make an educated decision on which framework suits best their
testing needs.
