The best approach for the data scientist to take in this scenario is to create a new branch in Databricks, commit their changes, and push those changes to the Git provider. This approach allows the data scientist to make updates and improvements to the feature engineering part of the preprocessing pipeline without affecting the main codebase that runs daily. By creating a new branch, they can work on their changes in isolation. Once the changes are ready and tested, they can be merged back into the main branch through a pull request, ensuring a smooth integration process and allowing for code review and collaboration with other team members.

References:

Databricks documentation on Git integration: Databricks Repos