This is a summary of the talk by Aslak Hellesoy.
Aslak is the founder of Cucumber, which has recently been bought by SmartBear. He has been experimenting with Petri Nets. It’s a concept he has learned in university but might be useful too, when writing software.
To explain a system, we often use state diagrams. These don’t work for concurrent parallel distributed systems.
Petri Nets do, because it’s step-based and you can wait for another system to complete.
At its core there’s places, tokens, transitions and arcs. A place needs a token to transition to another place via an arc.
Aslak developed an example of combining TDD with Petri Nets which enables using Petri Nets while doing TDD.
There is also extensions & colours, but we didn’t cover those.
