A higher level approach that I try follow is to design a quick experiment, log output etc., as soon as I 'think I know what the problem is related to'. Because

A higher level approach that I try follow is to design a quick experiment, log output etc., as soon as I 'think I know what the problem is related to'. Because I'm very often wrong about correlated events in the system actually being related to the cause of the bug, the quicker I can invalidate that bad idea with real evidence the better. My longest debugging session were too long because I spent so much time trying to validate a hunch when I should have been trying to invalidate it. This might seem like common sense but it's taken me years to figure this out and it's really made me much more efficient at finding root causes.