[teh_klev]

> That is the very definition of a waterfall design model.

I think you're conflating two different things. I've spent the last two days thinking about the impact of adding five new tables to our database for a feature, two of them just lookups. I've thought about the short term benefits and the long term possible problems (for something that isn't even spec'd yet).

This isn't "waterfall" this is just getting a design about right for the current circumstances.

If during the design phase you're already asking "okay, this is good but how would I change it?" then you're already waterfalling your design.

Being thoughtful about your design up front (waterfall as your claim) hopefully solves many a problem down the line when you've suddenly got 5900M+ rows of data in the wrong shape in your production database; because a production database of that size doesn't take kindly to being "agiled" around.