Ching's formative period spans from his entry into software development through the late 2000s. He has a computer science background combined with an MBA — an unusual pairing that prefigures his career-long effort to bridge technical practice and management thinking. This era ends with the publication of rocks-into-gold in 2009 and the early development of his consulting identity.
TOC discovery
Ching encountered eliyahu-goldratt's Theory of Constraints around 2003, during his corporate software development career. Goldratt's "The Goal" and the TOC framework offered something that most software management literature did not: a rigorous systems-level explanation for why projects fail and a specific intervention methodology. The Five Focusing Steps — identify the constraint, exploit it, subordinate everything else, elevate it — gave Ching a structured lens for diagnosing and improving software delivery systems.
The TOC discovery arrived just as the Agile movement was consolidating. The Agile Manifesto had been published in 2001, and Ching encountered both Agile and TOC in roughly the same period (c. 2002-2003). What he found was that TOC and Agile were addressing the same problems from complementary directions: Agile through iterative delivery and team practices, TOC through constraint identification and systemic focus. The synthesis became the intellectual core of everything that followed.
Agile Scotland chairmanship
During this period Ching became deeply embedded in the Scottish software development community, eventually serving as chairman of agile-scotland. Running a practitioner meetup for years provided ground-level exposure to real delivery problems and gave him a platform for developing and testing ideas. His position as community organizer rather than academic theorist shaped the practical, accessible tone of his later writing.
Early professional writing
During this period Ching began writing for StickyMinds.com, a software testing and quality publication. The column — covering critical chain scheduling, constraint identification, and quality revolution ideas — represents his earliest sustained professional writing and the apprenticeship period before his books. Several articles, including "Critical Chain Scheduling for Software Projects," were among his first published treatments of TOC for software audiences.
Rocks into Gold
rocks-into-gold (2009) marks the boundary of this era: Ching's first narrative experiment with the business novel format he would fully realize in rolling-rocks-downhill. The earlier book tests the parable approach — shorter, simpler, more tentative — establishing that narrative is the right vehicle for teaching toc-for-software-development before committing to the full novel format.
The synthesis of TOC and Agile that Ching arrived at during this era — not as competing frameworks but as complementary tools for the same problem — became the distinctive thesis he would develop and publish over the following decade.