An Automated Analysis of the Branch Coverage and Energy Consumption Using Concolic Testing

Abstract

The energy consumption of computer systems has become an important economic and environmental issue. Many researchers have focused on the energy consumption of hardware, but what about the software? Software energy consumption is widely adopted for Green computation of practical experimentation in research laboratories. But current researchers fail to build a consistent concept base for software energy consumption of critical applications. While branch coverage and concolic testing are very critical practices to validate the safety critical systems, very little effort is given to measure their energy consumption. The computation of the energy consumption of these techniques is an important issue in Green IT and Green Software Engineering. The contribution of this paper is to automate the computation and analysis of the energy consumption of the testing technique while enhancing the branch coverage using concolic testing. We implement our proposed automation framework in a tool, named Green Analysis of Branch Coverage Enhancement. The empirical study with forty Java programs and the evaluation results show that our developed tool achieves an average increase of 13.5 % in branch coverage. The average energy consumption of our automated tool is approximately 5.6 kJ to compute the branch coverage for all the forty experimental programs.