recusiveDescription is a pretty cool method. It's on each UIView, and when called it gives you a quick and dirty description of the current view hierarchy relative to that view.
Usually you'd use this in the debugger, whilst on a breakpoint, to sanity check the positions and children of a view. This is a short gist that adds the same functionality to a CCNode subclass - the common subclass of most visual entities in a Cocos2d project.