The spirit of the rules seems fairly clear even for software development. If you're being brought in to help with some specific project or to achieve some specific goal, you are doing that work autonomously and according to your own professional judgement, and you're otherwise operating as an independent business, you're not supposed to be caught by IR35. Obviously there will be some need for communication with other people who work for your client if the project or goal is part of the client's wider activities but that doesn't mean you're an employee.
Personally I'd get very nervous about the kind of contracting where you're expected to integrate with a client's Agile processes that have things like daily meetings and breaking tasks down to very small chunks where sometimes you get them and sometimes a permanent employee does and sometimes they move between you. That starts to look too much like a grey area even if everything else is set up like an independent business.
Maybe there should be some alternative status to support flexible temporary employees that reflects their closer involvement with a client/employer while they're working there but also makes allowances for the added risks and limited employee protections and the extra downtime they will probably have between gigs. It's obviously useful to have this kind of flexible labour force but it doesn't really make much sense to treat it the same as either running a truly independent business like a freelancer or being a full employee with the security and benefits that brings.
Edit: I'm thinking of a model where the rates and allowances work out the same as full-time permanent employment if you do end up working consistently but maybe the important figures get calculated over a whole tax year or can even be carried over across years to compensate for the unpredictability. Then you can probably let the market decide the rest of the pricing in terms of how much extra that flexibility is worth to clients and how much compensation is needed for the added risk to attract enough flexible workers.
Personally I'd get very nervous about the kind of contracting where you're expected to integrate with a client's Agile processes that have things like daily meetings and breaking tasks down to very small chunks where sometimes you get them and sometimes a permanent employee does and sometimes they move between you. That starts to look too much like a grey area even if everything else is set up like an independent business.
Maybe there should be some alternative status to support flexible temporary employees that reflects their closer involvement with a client/employer while they're working there but also makes allowances for the added risks and limited employee protections and the extra downtime they will probably have between gigs. It's obviously useful to have this kind of flexible labour force but it doesn't really make much sense to treat it the same as either running a truly independent business like a freelancer or being a full employee with the security and benefits that brings.
Edit: I'm thinking of a model where the rates and allowances work out the same as full-time permanent employment if you do end up working consistently but maybe the important figures get calculated over a whole tax year or can even be carried over across years to compensate for the unpredictability. Then you can probably let the market decide the rest of the pricing in terms of how much extra that flexibility is worth to clients and how much compensation is needed for the added risk to attract enough flexible workers.