A parallel development environment occurs when your company decides to ship a product on more than one platform (e.g., one for Windows and one for UNIX) or when your company needs to ship more than one release of a product (e.g., a main product release and a patch release).
For a discussion on the parallel platform environment, see About building on parallel platforms; for information on how to set up this environment, see Setting up a parallel platform. For a discussion on the parallel release environment, see Setting up parallel releases.