Which practice area focuses on identifying defects or issues in solutions?

The practice area that focuses on identifying defects or issues in solutions is Ensuring Quality (ENQ). This practice encompasses ongoing efforts to monitor and assess products and processes to ensure that they meet established quality standards and requirements. It is fundamentally about implementing quality assurance practices throughout the development lifecycle, which includes the detection of issues before they escalate into more significant problems.

By concentrating on ensuring quality, organizations can effectively identify defects early in the process, which is crucial for reducing waste, minimizing the cost of rework, and ultimately delivering higher-quality solutions to clients. This proactive approach is in alignment with best practices in quality management, where the aim is to achieve continual improvement and optimize the overall effectiveness of processes.

The other options relate to different aspects of quality and process improvement. Process Quality Assurance focuses on ensuring that processes are followed correctly but may not directly identify defects in the final solutions themselves. Verification and Validation are more about checking whether the product meets specifications and requirements, while Peer Reviews involve assessment by colleagues but do not singularly emphasize defect identification across the entire solution lifecycle. Ensuring Quality, therefore, stands out as the most comprehensive practice area for systematically identifying defects.