To follow Google-recommended SCM best practices and increase delivery velocity, which process should your team adopt?

Google-recommended SCM best practices, particularly for increasing delivery velocity, emphasize frequent integration and small, atomic changes. Creating a personal branch, committing changes, and merging into main daily aligns with this by minimizing merge conflicts and allowing for continuous integration and delivery. This approach ensures that the main branch is always in a releasable state. Committing directly to main before each release (option 1) introduces high risk due to infrequent integration and large changes, making rollbacks difficult. Copying the repository (option 2) is an anti-pattern that creates complex synchronization issues and is not a standard SCM practice. Merging feature branches only before major releases (option 4) leads to long-lived branches, increasing the likelihood and complexity of merge conflicts, thus hindering delivery velocity.