Vaughn Frick

W. Vaughn Frick is an American computer scientist and early pioneer in computer-aided software engineering, as well as structured analysis and structured design. He is the founder and president of Ashbec LLC, a management research and consulting firm in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Biography
With an BSE (1972) and an MSE (1976) in Industrial & Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan, Frick entered the computing field in 1970 to put himself through school. In 1985, while working on various software engineering processes at Nastec Corporation, Frick discovered the missing link transformation between Larry Constantine's Structured Design methods and the Ed Yourdon and Tom DeMarco Structured Analysis for Business Systems. Frick-based SA/SD training programs incorporating CASE tools proved more popular than the earlier Yourdon/Demarco training.
Frick's transformation from Structured Analysis to Structured Design, based on General Systems Theory, was literally, based on the geometry of data flow diagrams and structure charts. Using foam balls to represent data flow processes and colored twine to represent data and control flows, Frick visually demonstrated that, by selecting the "controlling process" and picking up the network of processes by the control process's foam ball, the structure chart literally "fell into place," in a manner identical to the construct predicted by Larry Constantine's structured design principles - including minimized coupling and maximized cohesion. Frick then worked with the software design team of Albert F. Case, Jr. to translate this geometric property into a set of design procedures used in a computer-aided software engineering tool.
Prior to starting Ashbec LLC, Vaughn was a Group Vice President for Gartner Inc. in the Research and eMetrix business units.

Frick is currently working on improving the quality and reducing the cost of healthcare in America. In 2010 he received US Patent No. 7,765,114 for his Treatment Optimization for Patient Safety (TOPS), a system designed to eliminate preventable medical error in a hospital inpatient setting.

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