The method is the measurement in reverse-phase chromatography, more so than in almost any other analytical domain, and two methods that look identical can easily produce different results.
The 214 nanometre wavelength is chosen because it corresponds to the amide backbone absorption, making response roughly proportional to the number of peptide bonds.
Trifluoroacetic acid at 0.1 per cent is the standard ion-pairing agent because it suppresses tailing by neutralising the basic residues, but it also suppresses mass spectrometry signal.
Peptide impurities from solid-phase synthesis include deletion sequences, truncations from premature cleavage, racemised residues from epimerisation and oxidised variants, each of which may have different chromatographic behaviour.
One qualification: the limit of detection on a reversed-phase HPLC is set by the noise on the baseline, which for these molecules is usually in the range of a tenth of one per cent or less, and anything smaller is not reproducibly detectable.
The practical summary: specify the method, run the same method on every sample you compare, and use orthogonal techniques to confirm the result.