Flow charts are very useful if you are working in an environment where you "design" the program, its control flow, and its data flow, before you start to code. Often I find that a customer must approve of how a product is to function before I spend the time to design and code. Whether the customer requires the flow charts or not it is often the best way to communicate to managers and business owners how a program COULD or WOULD work.

Design flow charts of this type rarely ever are of the detail where even the "subroutine-ization" and and data structure definition are included.

Taking the time to design and document also pays rewards in the coding and debug phase. I find that when I have flow charted out the structure of a product, and then have it design reviewed both at the manager level and the peer level then the coding process is almost always "turn the crank" with little need to do complex debugging. There is also much less "rip it apart" and recoding of sections of code because you left out an important characteristic needed in the software.

Complex algorithm development can also be aided in careful flow charting. I find that sitting behind a good tool like Visio or MathCad and documenting a process or algorithm will almost always result in a superior solution over the quick scratching out on a notepad or napkin. And then the more formal documentation is there in the computer for later use, ie. retraining yourself or others 5 years from now when the product needs support or an update, permitting non programmers to understand how a product works such as supporting a test group that may be trying to devise a functional test plan or a software validation process.

Now don't get me wrong....there are plenty of times that I produce a program with little or no pre-design or flow charting. But normally these are little things I have either done for myself or for a client in a small business environment where the product support is likely to only need be available for a short term (less than 2 years) and there is a high probability of my being available to support my code.

Michael Karas