Funny, the more my job involves explaining to developers what is needed rather than coding it myself, the more I tend to fall back on flowcharts and diagrams to describe the higher level business processes.
I'm all in favor of agile direct communication with the client, but one decent flowchart can save spending hours in meetings trying to get everyone to understand what the problem is we need to solve.
Although no longer needed to design every little detail of the code flow, it's still pretty much an essential skill to have in software development.
The main problem with flowcharts for programming is that flowcharts are procedural, whereas much of what we do in programming is declarative: the flowchart describes more how to do something than what has to be done (at some level).
Of course, this depends on at which level the flowchart is drawn.
I'm all in favor of agile direct communication with the client, but one decent flowchart can save spending hours in meetings trying to get everyone to understand what the problem is we need to solve.
Although no longer needed to design every little detail of the code flow, it's still pretty much an essential skill to have in software development.