The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Armstrong Flight Research Center has developed a cost-effective and flexible object-oriented optimization (O (sup 3)) tool that leverages existing tools and practices and allows easy integration and adoption of new state-of-the-art software. This object-oriented framework can integrate the analysis codes for multiple disciplines, as opposed to relying on one code to perform analysis for all disciplines. Optimization can thus take place within each discipline module, or in a loop between the O (sup 3) tool and the discipline modules, or both. Six different sample mathematical problems are presented to demonstrate the performance of the O (sup 3) tool. Instructions for preparing input data for the O (sup 3) tool are detailed in this user's manual.