I completely agree. In fact, I think running a debugger should never be the first option. My process: 1. Read the code and think about what it's really doing.

I completely agree. In fact, I think running a debugger should never be the first option. My process: 1. Read the code and think about what it's really doing. 2. If that leads nowhere, write (more?) unit/integration tests. 3. Only if the above two fail, run the debugger. "Contemplating" code has another benefit: since you're looking at the whole picture rather than jumping line-by-line it develops your intuition about why things fail.