I recently experienced bad software at an airport that meant the wait in the passport queue was longer than the flight.

I was in an airport recently waiting in the immigration queue for the automated passport gates - they had like 15 - of which 12 showed a red light and what looked like some C# error message on the screen ( comm problem talking to the camera ).

As I waited in the very long queue, another of the green lights turned red - then a member of staff came over and stopped people using them directly - they would take your passport and carefully place on the machine for you - clearly they were worried their last ones would also crash due to some user interaction.

Two things - how the heck could something so obviously not ready for production ever be shipped? And if this was a common problem, why weren't the staff able to reboot them?

Sure nobody died - but I do wonder if the problem is the typical software license agreement which typically tries to absolve the vendor of any responsibility at all for product quality - in a way you wouldn't accept for anything else.