Final answer:
The first step to solve the problem of consistently receiving defect reports from production is to ensure that development and testing environments are equivalent to production.
Step-by-step explanation:
To solve the problem of consistently receiving defect reports from production even though each story is thoroughly tested, the first step would be to ensure that development and testing environments are equivalent to production.
This means that the infrastructure and configurations used for testing should closely resemble the production environment. By doing so, any issues or defects that arise in the actual production environment can be identified and resolved during testing.
By having equivalent environments, it becomes easier to reproduce and debug issues reported from production. This is crucial for effective bug triaging and problem-solving. It allows the team to have a better understanding of how the software behaves in the production environment and ensure that the testing process covers all the necessary scenarios and use cases.
Once the environments are aligned, the team can move on to other steps such as instantiating a strict definition of done, investing in better story and unit-test automation, and creating story dependencies with the system team to collaborate on deployment.