How to Perform Android Battery Testing

The rapid battery discharge is one of the most widespread problem of today’s reality. Modern smartphones or tablets contain advanced features and they are full of diverse capabilities. But all this is the reason why software testing company should work harder than ever.

Frequently, users make some manipulations with their devices: switch off cellular data or select low power mode which reduces power consumption. For these reasons, QA specialists should execute thorough testing of battery to understand how much power is consumed by a certain application.

Usually, special testing tools are used to check battery consumption. Let us make an example how to check Android battery, using Battery Historian testing tool. Before proceeding directly to test process, one should consider the operation peculiarities of battery historian tool itself.

Battery Historian Tool Peculiarities:

• it is a Google tool;
• requires knowing of programming (at least command line);
• it is an open-source Python script;
• works on Android (starting from 5.0 version and later);
• analyze battery on the basis of Android bug report files;
• operates on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

The list above proves that this tool is rather effective. All you need to execute battery testing is to meet some requirements:

• activate USB debugging on Android device;
• install Python in the system;
• Android Debug Bridge (adb) presence.

Only after all requirements are met, QA team may start test process. Usually, the test procedure, using Battery Historian tool consists of five stages.

5 Stages of Android App Testing via Battery Historian Tool:

1. Removing all previous stats – first of all, to execute accurate testing, a tester should clear all stats in order to achieve relevant data (Adb command will look this way: “adb shell dumpsys batterystats –reset”).
2. After the statistics is cleared, the specialist should disconnect device from the system.
3. Execute diverse test scenarios in order to define what consumes the most of power. It is important to behave like the user to better realize the impact of user experience on battery lifecycle.
4. Connect device to the system again and create a bug report (Adb command will look this way: adb bugreport > batterydata.txt). On the base of this log file, the tool may get statistics of the device battery.
5. Download Battery historian tool to be able to generate HTML report, using Android log file (Use this command: python historian.py batterydata.txt > batteryinfo.HTML).

Therefore, mobile testing, integration checking, multi-platform testing, load control, usability testing, and other standard types of QA activity may be added with such kind of checking as battery testing.