Debugging 101 - Measure, do your homework and think out of the box

Being confronted with an occasional bug in a complex system can be quite overwhelming. There are three disciplines that help you to stay strong: 1) Read and learn about your platform and how to debug it. 2) Use tools to quickly get the low hanging fruit. This might be enough in most of the cases to identify the bug. 3) Think out of the box and try to be creative. Build a model, play with it, break it and fix it. In the worst case, you won't have found the cause of the bug, but you learned at least something new about your software.