Scaling Mobile Chaos Testing with AI-Driven Test Execution

TL;DR

This paper introduces an AI-driven mobile chaos testing system that automates and scales resilience validation for large mobile applications, identifying critical failure points with minimal manual effort.

Contribution

It presents a novel integration of LLM-based testing with fault injection, enabling scalable, automated resilience testing for mobile apps at production scale.

Findings

Executed over 180,000 chaos tests across Uber apps

Identified 23 resilience risks, including critical failures

Achieved 88% precision in root cause attribution

Abstract

Mobile applications in large-scale distributed systems are susceptible to backend service failures, yet traditional chaos engineering approaches cannot scale mobile testing due to the combinatorial explosion of flows, locations, and failure scenarios that need validation. We present an automated mobile chaos testing system that integrates DragonCrawl, an LLM-based mobile testing platform, with uHavoc, a service-level fault injection system. The key insight is that adaptive AI-driven test execution can navigate mobile applications under degraded backend conditions, eliminating the need to manually write test cases for each combination of user flow, city, and failure type. Since Q1 2024, our system has executed over 180,000 automated chaos tests across 47 critical flows in Uber's Rider, Driver, and Eats applications, representing approximately 39,000 hours of manual testing effort that would be impractical at this scale. We identified 23 resilience risks, with 70% being architectural dependency violations where non-critical service failures degraded core user flows. Twelve issues were severe enough to prevent trip requests or food orders. Two caused application crashes detectable only through mobile chaos testing, not backend testing alone. Automated root cause analysis reduced debugging time from hours to minutes, achieving 88% precision@5 in attributing mobile failures to specific backend services. This paper presents the system design, evaluates its performance under fault injection (maintaining 99% test reliability), and reports operational experience demonstrating that continuous mobile resilience validation is achievable at production scale.