CCARF Practice Question

Paper 4 · Question 37

D5 Context Management & Reliability · Paper 4

A web search subagent in a multi-agent research system times out while researching a complex topic. You need to design how this failure information flows back to the coordinator. Which approach best enables intelligent recovery?

• A.Propagate the timeout exception to a top-level handler that terminates the entire research workflow at once, discarding everything.
• B.Return structured error context including failure type, attempted query, partial results, and potential alternative approaches
• C.Catch the timeout and return an empty result set marked as successful, so the rest of the workflow carries on regardless of the failure.
• D.Implement automatic retry with exponential backoff, returning a generic 'search unavailable' status only after all retries are exhausted

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: B

A: Workflow termination wastes partial results from other subagents that may have completed successfully.

B: This gives the coordinator everything it needs to decide: retry with modified query, try an alternative approach, or proceed with partial results.

C: Silent suppression prevents any recovery. The coordinator believes the search succeeded and found nothing, so it will not attempt alternatives.

D: The generic status hides valuable context from the coordinator, preventing informed recovery decisions.

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