 <p>This seems to be more related to the way I was including Espresso than it is a Dagger issue... </p> <pre><code>androidTestCompile ('com.google.android.apps.common.testing:espresso:1.1' ){ exclude group: 'com.squareup.dagger' } </code></pre> <p>Switching to Jake Wharton's "double-espresso" made the problem go away.</p> <p><a href="https://github.com/JakeWharton/double-espresso" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JakeWharton/double-espresso</a></p> <p>I am still not sure why that would cause a NoClassDefFoundError on that Dagger generated class.</p>