An iterative model which has been up-front loaded with a firm architecture, feature elaboration, a rough development and testing plan, resources allocated and some basic milestones to hit so that upper mgmt. can get an idea when useful stuff might land.
The development _process_ can be as agile-y as you like, so long as the development of features moves incrementally with each iteration towards the desired end-goal.
I'm not sure that follows. If most programming is thinking, then it makes sense to minimise the amount of thinking that is wasted when circumstances later change.
