I think troubleshooting has a lot of overlap with thinking along the lines of the scientific method. 1. You have to start having hypotheses that you test, but

I think troubleshooting has a lot of overlap with thinking along the lines of the scientific method. 1. You have to start having hypotheses that you test, but should be ready to throw them away as quickly as you thought of them, when the results from testing it says so. Let data 2. You should preferably think hard about effective way to quickly rule out influencing variables and so quickly square in on the area where the erroneous effect is coming from. 3. You have to really rule out confounders. Make sure to turn off any caches or similar that might play games with you. The area where I see most colleagues fail in this process is not being stringent enough with things like ruling out confounders and being systematic about organizing the outputs from hypothesis testing, to make sure you are 100% which outputs belong to which inputs etc. It is the discipline and strictness in the process that will do the trick. Anything less and you will just trick yourself.