I've always been one of the developers at work that people bring their Spring questions to. Usually I just change the logging level and read the errors. Quite often it will tell you what you need to do or give you a good hint at least.

Another "trick" is reading the official documentation. There is a lot of cruft out there, so go straight to the source.

It's really a great framework but they do give you many guns to shoot yourself in the foot with.