In the context of software quality engineering, a fundamental distinction is made between the activities of finding defects and fixing them. Assessment of program quality (B) is primarily achieved through testing, which is the process of executing a program to find defects and evaluate its characteristics against requirements. The removal of defects (A), commonly known as debugging, is the subsequent and distinct activity of locating the root cause of a defect and correcting the code. These two activities are separate processes, often performed by different teams (testers and developers), and represent the core cycle of quality assessment and improvement in most software projects.

A. The removal of defects: This is an incomplete answer as it only represents one of the two distinct activities; it omits the assessment of quality.

B. The assessment of program quality: This is also an incomplete answer, representing only the assessment activity while omitting the defect removal process.

C. Application of technology to critical tasks: This statement is too general. While projects do apply technology, this is not one of the two specific, distinct activities related to software quality and defect management.

1. MIT OpenCourseWare, 6.170 Software Studio, Fall 2005, Lecture 2: Testing. This course material explicitly distinguishes between the two activities. It states, "Testing and debugging are different. Testing is finding inputs that cause the software to fail. Debugging is finding the cause of the failure and fixing it." (Section: "Testing vs. Debugging").

2. Ammann, P., & Offutt, J. (2016). Introduction to Software Testing (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1, Section 1.2, "Testing and Debugging," clarifies: "The purpose of testing is to find faults, and the purpose of debugging is to find the cause of a failure and remove the fault... Thus, testing and debugging are two distinct activities."

3. Naik, S., & Tripathy, P. (2011). Software Testing and Quality Assurance: Theory and Practice. Wiley. Chapter 1, Section 1.3, "What is the Difference Between Testing and Debugging?", page 6, states: "Testing is a process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors. Debugging is the process of locating and correcting the errors... Testing and debugging are two different, but related, activities."