Status fields aren’t much help when you’re 8 days in on “in progress” for a ticket that was originally estimated to take 2. Often that’s exactly when you need to have a conversation. Scope is creeping; or the engineer is taking a poor approach and needs to talk it through with someone; or there’s some tech debt that warrants investing in refactoring; or the engineer just plain misunderstood the goals. And they’re almost certainly demoralized by now and need encouragement or help seeing a way out of the swamp.