Experiences developing and maintaining software in a multi-platform environment

The computer market demands that companies develop families of software products that can be scaled to meet the functional and performance needs of the personal and business computer markets. To support a family of LaserJet printer products, Hewlett-Packard defined the multi platform parallel development model for software development. This model allows HP to simultaneously develop a family of LaserJet printers that have different features and run on different processors, while shortening the development. We discuss our experiences using a technique called conditional compilation, within the multi platform parallel development model, to create portable, scaleable software systems. We describe and share a new tool that was developed to help understand code containing conditional compilation. Examples of using the tool on industrial source code, and lessons learned while managing conditional compilation complexity, are provided