How to ease the maintenance of event driven code?

Question

When using an event based component I often feel some pain at maintenance phase.

Since the executed code is all split around it can be quite hard to figure what will be all the code part that will be involved at runtime.

This can lead to subtle and hard to debug problems when someone adds some new event handlers.

Edit from comments: Even with some good practices on-board, like having an application wide event bus and handlers delegating business to other part of the app, there is a moment when the code starts to become hard to read because there is a lot of registered handlers from many different places (especially true when there is a bus).

Then sequence diagram starts to look over complex, time spend to figure out what is happening is increasing and debugging session becomes messy (breakpoint on the handlers manager while iterating on handlers, especially joyful with async handler and some filtering on top of it).

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Example

I have a service that is retrieving some data on the server. On the client we have a basic component that is calling this service using a callback. To provide extension point to the users of the component and to avoid coupling between different components, we are firing some events: one before the query is sent, one when the answer is coming back and another one in case of a failure. We have a basic set of handlers that are pre-registered which provide the default behavior of the component.

Now users of the component (and we are user of the component too) can add some handlers to perform some change on the behavior (modify the query, logs, data analysis, data filtering, data massaging, UI fancy animation, chain multiple sequential queries, whatever). So some handlers must be executed before/after some others and they are registered from a lots of different entry point in the application.

After a while, it can happens that a dozen or more handlers are registered, and working with that can be tedious and hazardous.

This design emerged because using inheritance was starting to be a complete mess. The event system is used at a kind of composition where you don't know yet what will be your composites.

End of example
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So I'm wondering how other people are tackling this kind of code. Both when writing and reading it.

Do you have any methods or tools that let you write and maintain such code without to much pain ?