Ching was a regular columnist on StickyMinds.com, a software testing and quality publication run by TechWell. The column predates his books and represents his earliest sustained professional writing -- the apprenticeship period before rocks-into-gold and rolling-rocks-downhill.
Known articles
Individual articles that have been identified include:
Some of these articles were cross-published or republished on AgileConnection (a sister TechWell site focused on Agile practitioners), expanding their reach.
Significance
The StickyMinds column is significant for three reasons. First, it establishes Ching as a practitioner-writer before his books -- he was testing ideas and building an audience in the software testing community during the early-career-and-toc-discovery era. Second, the software testing/quality audience is where constraint thinking often lands most naturally: testing is frequently the bottleneck in software delivery, making it the constraint that the focccus-formula finds first. Third, the column demonstrates the analogical, story-driven approach to TOC education that would become Ching's signature style -- the same approach he later used in rolling-rocks-downhill and theorized in business-novel-as-pedagogy.
The "Critical Chain Scheduling for Software Projects" article is particularly notable as an early published bridge between Goldratt's Critical Chain (a manufacturing/project-management concept) and software development scheduling -- a translation that would become central to Ching's career.