Faster testing on Android with Mobile Test Orchestrator
Article Summary
LinkedIn's Android test suite hit tens of thousands of tests, pushing execution times into the danger zone. Developer productivity was tanking.
LinkedIn engineers built Mobile Test Orchestrator (MTO) to solve a scaling crisis: keeping test runs under 10 minutes as their suite exploded in size. They chose a pull-based distribution model with dynamic emulator provisioning.
Key Takeaways
- Single machine with 16 emulators: 80 minutes for 10,000 tests
- 10 hosts with 160 emulators: execution dropped to 10 minutes
- Orchestration uses only 1-2% CPU via async I/O operations
- Pull-based model beats push: simpler logic, better fault tolerance
- Dynamic emulator clouds reduce monitoring overhead versus persistent pools
Critical Insight
MTO achieved an 8x speedup by distributing tests across 160 emulators, hitting the critical 10-minute target while staying easily scalable.
