An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport's high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport's opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug--reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler's designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

The high price of poor software design is paid daily by millions of frustrated users. Other notorious cases include costly debacles at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (a failed $4-billion modernization effort in 1997, followed by an equally troubled $8-billion updating project); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (a $170-million virtual case-file management system was scrapped in 2005); and the Federal Aviation Administration (a lingering and still unsuccessful attempt to renovate its aging air-traffic control system).

   
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