diff --git a/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/DirectKafkaStreamSuite.scala b/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/DirectKafkaStreamSuite.scala
index 1974bb1e12e1..93d0d2fd06c7 100644
--- a/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/DirectKafkaStreamSuite.scala
+++ b/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/DirectKafkaStreamSuite.scala
@@ -52,6 +52,9 @@ class DirectKafkaStreamSuite
   val sparkConf = new SparkConf()
     .setMaster("local[4]")
     .setAppName(this.getClass.getSimpleName)
+    // Set a timeout of 10 seconds that's going to be used to fetch topics/partitions from kafka.
+    // Othewise the poll timeout defaults to 2 minutes and causes test cases to run longer.
+    .set("spark.streaming.kafka.consumer.poll.ms", "10000")
 
   private var ssc: StreamingContext = _
   private var testDir: File = _
diff --git a/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/KafkaRDDSuite.scala b/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/KafkaRDDSuite.scala
index 561bca5f5537..47bc8fec2c80 100644
--- a/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/KafkaRDDSuite.scala
+++ b/external/kafka-0-10/src/test/scala/org/apache/spark/streaming/kafka010/KafkaRDDSuite.scala
@@ -41,6 +41,10 @@ class KafkaRDDSuite extends SparkFunSuite with BeforeAndAfterAll {
 
   private val sparkConf = new SparkConf().setMaster("local[4]")
     .setAppName(this.getClass.getSimpleName)
+    // Set a timeout of 10 seconds that's going to be used to fetch topics/partitions from kafka.
+    // Othewise the poll timeout defaults to 2 minutes and causes test cases to run longer.
+    .set("spark.streaming.kafka.consumer.poll.ms", "10000")
+
   private var sc: SparkContext = _
 
   override def beforeAll {