The CRITICAL Software Technology for an Evolutionary Partnership (CRITICAL STEP) is a Marie-Curie Industry-Academia Partnerships and Pathways (IAPP) belonging to call FP7-PEOPLE-2008-IAPP. It aims at establishing the basis for a long term strategic research collaboration between partners involved in this project in the growing and challenging domain of software for large-scale Safety-Critical Systems (SCSs) based on the use of Off-The-Shelf (OTS) software components for the control of complex distributed infrastructures such as Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems, complex industrial plants, etc. Partners feel they are in need of sharing and combining their knowledge and use the existing synergies/complementarities to set long term strategic bases to deal with the complexity of the next generation SCSs, resist market competition and win the challenge of developing new safe technologies and standards. The project will be implemented via secondment and recruitment of 182 RM in total: 72 RM for recruitment of 3 experienced researchers and 110 RM for secondments of 13 research fellows from the participating organizations.