A member of our development team was unable to determine the cause of a pesky warning message that kept popping up in our code. The developer thought it would take weeks to track it down. So it got passed to me.I thought this would be a trivial task. Just duplicate the problem, break into the code in debug mode, and find out why it was happening. Easier said then done.
Part of the difficulty was that the text of the error message did not make a lot of sense given its context. A bigger problem was that the code was very complex. There were related classes involved that had data members with the same name. Ouch.
So I reverted back to the techniques I have learned over the years. Set some breakpoints to find the code closest to the problem. Use the "find in files" (aka grep) technique to try to search for where important variables are set. In the end I traced the problem back to a missing item in an array which described all the database columns our query was retrieving.
Sometimes you just need experience to plow through someone else's code and debug problems.
