Cognitive cooperation is often neglected in current team software development processes. This issue becomes more important than ever when team members are globally distributed. This paper presents a notion of knowledge flow and the related management mechanism for realizing an ordered knowledge sharing and cognitive cooperation in a geographically distributed team software development process. The knowledge flow can carry and accumulate knowledge when it goes through from one team member to another. The coordination between the knowledge flow process and the workflow process of a development team provides a new way to improve traditional team software development processes. A knowledge grid platform has been implemented to support the knowledge flow management across the Internet. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.