Testing Workflow Routing and Agent Behavior in Conductor

Orkes Conductor’s testing tools help developers debug nondeterministic multi-agent LLM workflows by simulating deterministic events, enabling fast unit tests without consuming model tokens or relying on external services. The walkthrough configures a Python environment with the Conductor SDK and pytest, defines a sequential three-agent content pipeline for web search, summarization, and editing, and deploys it through an AgentRuntime connected to Orkes Developer Edition. It then demonstrates mocked workflow runs using handoff, tool-call, tool-result, and completion events, along with assertions that verify agents ran, tools were used, and arguments were passed correctly. The example also introduces intentional failures, such as referencing a nonexistent agent or skipping the summary agent, to show how pytest’s raises mechanism can validate expected AssertionError and StrategyViolation exceptions. While mock-based tests are useful for validating routing and workflow strategies, they must be maintained alongside the real workflow and cannot reveal issues that only occur in live LLM executions, which the series proposes to address through future integration testing methods.

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