Demand for IT contractors rocketing? You're joking.

[hungry_hog]

Place I worked before they would have environments as:

dev - very much build and test, nightly releases, tested by devs
UAT1 - automated system test (configured by test team)
UAT2 - manual functional test, tested by BAs
pre prod - prod like, light manual test, tested by BAs
prod - tested by users

[Peoplesoft bloke]

At the risk of derailing what has become a narrow debate about testing, demand is patchy. My area - implementations of Workday - experienced an almost total collapse in demand due to a combination of Covid and the recent IR35 changes. Typically we'd do a 6 months contract, sometimes extended sometimes not, then move to the next customer. It's rare to be at any customer longer than 2 years as if you are, their implementation has gone wrong.

There have been a (very) few gigs advertised in the last year or so, but demand certainly hasn't rocketed.

In my sector, it's generally, go FTC, permie or nothing. Almost no clients are offering outside IR35 contracts.

[lawnmower]

It also depends on where you are in the Software supply chain. If you are developing software for e.g. an external supplier (working in eg a software house) which is then is sold to an end client, that end client may well want to do loads of conventional tests of the software they are receiving into their organisation. The software house itself may do very little testing or possibly do automated testing carried out by developers etc. However when the software is put into a real life situation where it has to be configured to support a business process, there would definitely be manual and UAT tests and user training as well. Probably a lot of people on this forum are working in more of an external supplier/software house situation, which accounts for their perspective. Having said that there's still a noticeable lack of contract opportunities. Yes BAs may be doing it but that wouldn't be an independent test as the BA would have also produced the requirements presumably.