Joe is a project manager on an industrial design project. he has found a pattern of defects occurring in all of his projects over the past few years and he thinks there might be a problem in the process his company is using that is causing it. he uses ishikawa diagrams to come up with the root cause for this trend over projects so that he can make recommendations for process changes to avoid this problem in the future. what process is he doing?

Quality Assurance Analysis

Explanation:

Here the work performed by Joe is that of Quality Assurance.

As Joe has performed the root cause analysis understanding the defects, and then further took a step to analyse the defects and their pattern in order to find the solution for those defects.

Whenever there is Quality Control Performed then we check the defects caused, and their sources.

In Quality Assurance a further step to Quality Control is taken and it is analysed what are the impacts of such defects on the process.

Therefore, the answer is

Quality Assurance Analysis