I am a strong believer that if we have a skill in one area of our life, that skill spills over into other areas of our life…. and developers solve problems all day long. I’m working on a series of articles that explores how developers solve problems, outside of code. <p>I'm interested in your thoughts... I know a lot of you have a development background or work closely with people who do, would you be willing to take a short survey that might lead to a deeper discussion?<p>https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vvRtBaQCGtQVz-7wrJTVeuXxJ5zAR02AbCc8MUPaD5A/viewform
The late Earl Nightingale had an excellent article on the subject of problem solving; which a refer to a couple of times a year.<p>The Great Problem-Solving Tool> <a href="http://www.nightingale.com/articles/the-great-problem-solving-tool/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nightingale.com/articles/the-great-problem-solvin...</a>
1. Understand the result you want.
2. List possible ways to achieve this result(whether this be ways to debug a program or similar)
3. Weight each option to each other doing simple cost-benifit
4. Follow cheapest method that gets the results done.
I suggest reading "How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method" by G. Polya und John H. Conway. Note: it's not about mathematics but about general problem solving.