CCARF Practice Question

Paper 5 · Question 5

D5 Context Management & Reliability · Paper 5

[Scenario: Multi-agent Research System] The web-search subagent returns results for only 3 of 5 requested source categories (competitor sites and industry reports succeed, but news archives and social feeds time out). The document analysis subagent successfully processes all provided documents. The synthesis subagent must produce a summary from mixed-quality upstream inputs. Which error-propagation strategy is most effective?

• A.Continue synthesis using only successful sources and produce an output without mentioning which data was unavailable.
• B.The synthesis subagent returns an error to the coordinator, triggering a full retry or task failure due to incomplete data.
• C.The synthesis subagent asks the coordinator to retry timed-out sources with a longer timeout before starting synthesis.
• D.Structure the synthesis output with coverage annotations that indicate which conclusions are well-supported and where gaps exist due to unavailable sources.

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: D

A: A summary that omits the missing sources reads as complete. Later decisions then treat a partial evidence base as full coverage.

B: Failing the task discards the categories and documents that did succeed.

C: Holding synthesis for a longer retry couples finished work to a timeout the coordinator has not yet decided to retry.

D: Coverage annotations implement graceful degradation with transparency, preserving value from completed work while propagating uncertainty to enable informed decisions about confidence.

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