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Are There Opportunities to Use OODA Loops in Your Software Project?

by philk10 on 3/13/25, 1:21 PM with 12 comments

  • by mmooss on 3/13/25, 2:06 PM

    I'm familliar with OODA but I've wondered how well the theory holds up in reality - that is, is there research that supports it?

    I've found that the concept - appealingly memorable and elegent to me and apparently others - has spread elsewhere; I've heard military people use it like it's assumed, but I haven't found any research showing that people actually work that way or even that the concept is helpful (I haven't looked extensively either).

  • by jauntywundrkind on 3/13/25, 3:35 PM

    OODA loop is what powers Kubernetes. The controlller lies at the heart of everything, the API is a Desired State Management, autonomic OODA controllers attempt to fulfill and maintain that desired state. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/architecture/controller/

    You can write "cloud native" systems in this pattern. You can also write Custom Resources to extend this pattern to your own systems, and run them via Kube (optional).

    I also really enjoyed this submission yesterday on Teleo-Reactive systems, systems which monitor environment/state & adjust their planning & potentially objectives as the environment/state changes. https://web.archive.org/web/20220815134119/https://teleoreac... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43346783

  • by mmooss on 3/13/25, 2:23 PM

    > (diagram for 'Orient')

    (This diagram seems to match Wikipedia's, which claims it's from Boyd or based on Boyd.)

    The components of 'Orient', the analytical step, are a bit odd: There's no training, skill, knowledge, or intuition; even more critically there's no emotional input, including the influence of present emotion (anger, anxiety, fear, calm, etc.) and our feeling about different options - which is most of how humans orient and decide, especially when choosing quickly.

    The diagram lists only culture, genetics, new information, prior experiences, and analysis & synthesis. The last three are unavoidable; the first two seem almost ideological to focus on, given the obvious ones I mention are excluded.

    Possibly, Boyd says otherwise (we don't have the primary source), or somehow the categories include the inputs I mentioned.

    Also,

    > Over time, he formalized his ideas of warfare in his classic “Patterns of Conflict” lectures that inspired the Maneuver Warfare doctrine of the Marine Corps.

    Afaik, maneuver warfare goes back to WWII or maybe before. Boyd was born in 1927 and became prominent in ~1960s.

  • by Nifty3929 on 3/13/25, 2:56 PM

    OODA applied to software projects is basically the kernel of "agile" programming.

    Iterate quickly, responding to feedback at each iteration.