Pretty much like the ones you're describing. What I find extremely valuable is to Google search for specific stack trace error messages as search phrases. Jus

Pretty much like the ones you're describing. What I find extremely valuable is to Google search for specific stack trace error messages as search phrases. Just as some other commenters said this requires experience. I sometimes jokingly say that I'm not a good programmer I just know how to use Google and Stack Overflow very effectively. In order to be able to do so you have to be able to ask the right questions though (e.g. not just pasting "NullPointerException" into the search box but the specific line in a 3rd party library this exception occurs in).