CCAR-F objective 5.3 · Domain 5 · 15% of the exam

Error Propagation in Multi-Agent Systems

A failure that stops looking like a failure is the defect these items are about. A worker that cannot reach a source and returns findings alone has converted a partial result into an apparently complete one, and everything downstream then reasons from a false premise while looking entirely plausible, because the later stages did their jobs correctly on bad input. Could not look and nothing there are the two facts that must never collapse into each other. Not everything travels upward, though: a timeout that succeeded on retry was recovered without loss, and reporting it is noise rather than propagation.