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I've been stumped countless times. It can be demoralizing at times, but I've always found a way through. Some things that help:

- Break the problem down into smaller pieces. Analyze/Attack each piece.

- Try to attack the problem from a different angle.

- Step back, explain the problem to someone. Sometimes just explaining yourself helps highlight your assumptions, and can help you re-arrange your approach.

- Keep at it. Keep trying different things.

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I totally agree with this, the bug catching block, occurs because we are not sure if catching this bug will solve our problem at all.

Also this helped me a lot in making things dirtier, use some form of version control system (must). I cannot emphasize more on this. this is to bring you back to the original problem state, which is most cases is simpler than you think.

It seems that as I am getting more experienced (older :) its easier to think about all possible things that can go wrong and build up a bigger than necessary model of the problem. Cant recall how many times the problem turned out to be smaller than I originally thought it'd be.

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