DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through development and into production support. It aims to deliver software incrementally from the start of a project through continuous delivery in short two week cycles called iterations. Adopting DevOps, even for large mainframe shops, can lead to significant gains like reducing critical defects by 80% and improving maintenance efficiency by 20% in just 18 months. DevOps establishes a continuous feedback loop that speeds up development and deployment while maintaining quality, moving away from traditional waterfall methodologies.