CCARF Practice Question

Paper 3 · Question 30

D5 Context Management & Reliability · Paper 3

[Scenario 3: Multi-Agent Research System] A coordinator agent built on the Claude Agent SDK delegates to specialized subagents — web search, document analysis, synthesis, and report generation — to research topics and produce comprehensive, cited reports. You are designing how the web search subagent behaves when its searches fail or return nothing. Which TWO behaviors are correct? (Select TWO.)

• A.On any failure, immediately terminate the entire research workflow
• B.Attempt local recovery for transient failures (e.g., retrying a timeout), and propagate to the coordinator only errors it cannot resolve — including what was attempted and any partial results
• C.Return empty results marked as success whenever a search fails, keeping the pipeline moving
• D.Report every problem as a generic “search unavailable” status
• E.Distinguish access failures (timeouts, service errors) from valid empty results (successful queries with no matches), since the two require different coordinator decisions Scenario 4: Developer Productivity with Claude You are building developer productivity tooling on the Claude Agent SDK: helping engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate, and automate repetitive tasks — using the built-in tools (Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Grep, Glob) plus MCP servers.

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: B, E

A: makes any single failure fatal when partial-result strategies exist

B: Resilient error propagation is layered and honest: handle locally what is locally fixable, escalate the rest with context the coordinator can act on, and never conflate “the search broke” with “the search found nothing.”

C: is silent suppression — failure dressed as fact

D: hides the very context that recovery decisions need

E: Resilient error propagation is layered and honest: handle locally what is locally fixable, escalate the rest with context the coordinator can act on, and never conflate “the search broke” with “the search found nothing.”

Related Context Management & Reliability questions

More: Paper 3 · All practice questions