[discodave]

I would argue it happens at an even higher level the 'planning' level.

One of the basic philosophical differences between the agile and waterfall approach is that agile assumes that you cannot know all the requirements at the beginning of a project. You must start building things before all the little dirty edge cases become obvious. Additionally you don't actually know if you're going in the right direction until you have something concrete to work with, even if it's mock ups or wire frames.

What I think they should of done in this case is rolled out the site in stages, probably starting with one state that had an easy backend to work with and gradually adding complexity to the site.