One of the most important factors in the successful development of modern IT companies is an effective and flexible personnel policy that can ensure the continuous recruiting of new employees and introducing them to professional activities. The article examines the issues of professional development of newcomers in modern IT projects, determines the factors of its success and analyzes the essence of the phenomenon of onboarding in the context of its relation to such constructs as "adaptation", "mentoring" and "tutoring". Onboarding is considered, on the one hand, as a phenomenon that reflects the systematic purposeful interaction between a social organization and its new employee, which aims to integrate a new team member with existent working conditions and ensure their productive performance in the shortest possible time, and on the other - as a partnership between an experienced employee (mentor) and a new specialist for the purpose of training, support, and professional development facilitation. The work contains an analysis of specialized software for successful onboarding in the conditions of modern IT projects. It also reveals the results of an empirical study of onboarding in IT projects with the participation of experienced mentors and young professionals, the results of which revealed the main factors of successful adaptation of newcomers to the new conditions of their professional activity: regulation of onboarding and mentoring processes in the project team and IT companies using internal regulatory documents, specialized software, etc.; productive cooperation between the mentor and the novice, which involves the analysis of project documentation, implemented through reflective technologies and aimed at understanding the new employee's expectations and requirements for their professional performance, communication, behavior in the project team; professional competence of the mentor, which is determined by their experience in project activities, deep understanding of the project and processes in it, as well as non-technical skills (communicative, emotional, regulatory, cognitive and metacognitive).

Today, considerable attention is paid to the higher education quality issues. The problem is solved by using tests that should provide a reliable student evaluation. The article presents the technology for improving test tasks. It includes functional procedures that specify the test and test task improvement sequence. It is found that it is better to use specialized computer applications for their implementation, that is why this technology involves the use of the author program “Statistical Analysis of Test Results”. This program calculates the indicators – the item difficulty, discrimination, reliability and validity – according to empirical student testing data. The indicators help identify unsatisfactory quality test tasks and improve the student assessment means, as the program derives the recommendations. The steps set out by the testing result processing technology with the help of a statistical package increase the improvement process efficiency. The correlation and factor analyses help identify the tasks that put the highest load into the test score. These procedures influence on making a decision on the test task review need. The technology involves repeated checking procedures. The presented technology has been tested at Zaporizhzhya National University and Zaporizhzhya Regional Institute of Postgraduate Teacher Education. ANOVA has helped prove its effectiveness.