  Background: The quality of a software product depends on the quality of the
software process followed in developing the product. Therefore, many higher
education institutions (HEI) and software organizations have implemented
software process improvement (SPI) training courses to improve the software
quality. Objective: Because the duration of a course is a concern for HEI and
software organizations, we investigate whether the quality of software projects
will be improved by reorganizing the activities of the ten assignments of the
original personal software process (PSP) course into a modified PSP having
fewer assignments (i.e., seven assignments). Method: The assignments were
developed by following a modified PSP with fewer assignments but including the
phases, forms, standards, and logs suggested in the original PSP. The
measurement of the quality of the software assignments was based on defect
density. Results: When the activities in the original PSP were reordered into
fewer assignments, as practitioners progress through the PSP training, the
defect density improved with statistical significance. Conclusions: Our
modified PSP could be applied in academy and industrial environments which are
concerned in the sense of reducing the PSP training time
