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Abstract.To be cost effective, the decision to automate tests that are usually hand-executed has to rely on a tradeoff between the time consumed to build the automation infrastructure and the time actually saved by the automated tests. Techniques which improve software reuse not only reduce the cost of automation, but the resulting productivity gain speeds up development. Such issues are specially relevant to the software development for mobile phones, where the time-to-market pressure asks for faster design and requires quicker deployment of new products. This paper presents a novel object-oriented framework tailored to support the automation of user-level test cases so as to improve the rate of deployment of mobile phones. Despite inherent test automation limitations, experimental results show that, with automation, the overall testing effort is about three times less than the manual effort, when measured within a one-year interval.