Sorry, missed your reply to this. So this came out of the experience at my previous job where we were a big team working on a rapidly changing codebase and we reckon that resolving conflicts was taking anything from 5-10 engineer hours a week.

We tried quite a few processes to reduce it and they'd all work for a few weeks but inevitably we'd revert back to old behaviour pretty fast.

On your point about it being a procrastination tool, I'd love it if my team members took a minute to stop work and converse with the others if they're working on the same bit of code! Aside from time saved fixing a potential conflict it's probably indicative that a particular bit of the system needs to be refactored. Anything that can help guide the decision to refactor is probably a force for good but we'll see. H