Clark Ching is a practitioner and author who has worked at the intersection of theory-of-constraints and Agile software development, translating Goldratt's constraint logic into the vocabulary and workflows of modern software teams.
His novel "Rolling Rocks Downhill" applies TOC principles to software delivery in the same way that the-goal applied them to manufacturing — using fiction to dramatize the systemic failures that occur when work is managed without understanding constraints. The book is explicitly positioned in the tradition of the-goal and gene-kim's "The Phoenix Project," forming part of a growing body of TOC-influenced software literature.
Ching's contribution is in bridging two communities that developed largely independently: the TOC practitioner world, shaped by eliyahu-goldratt's manufacturing and distribution focus, and the Agile movement, which emerged from software engineering. Both communities address flow, waste, and systemic improvement, but they developed distinct vocabularies and tools. Ching helps practitioners in each community see the other's insights.
His work on applying drum-buffer-rope and buffer-management concepts to software sprints and release pipelines connects the operational specificity of TOC's manufacturing heritage to the iterative cadence of Agile delivery. In the post-goldratt-continuation era, this kind of translation work — making TOC legible to new practitioner communities — is essential to the methodology's continued growth and relevance beyond its original industrial context.