The rapid increase in demand for data-intensive applications capable of exploiting Big Data technologies such as Hadoop/MapReduce, NoSQL, cloud-based storage, and stream processing is creating massive growth opportunities for European independent software vendors (ISVs). However, developing software that meets the high-quality standards expected for business-critical cloud applications remains a barrier to this market for many small and medium ISVs, which often lack resources and expertise for advanced quality engineering. DICE will tackle this challenge by defining a quality-driven development methodology and related tools that will markedly accelerate the development of business-critical data-intensive applications running on public or private clouds. Building on the principles of model-driven development (MDD) and on popular standards such as UML, MARTE and TOSCA, the project will first define a novel MDD methodology that can describe data and data-intensive technologies in cloud applications. A quality engineering toolchain offering simulation, verification, and numerical optimisation will leverage these extensions to drive the early design stages of the application development and guide software quality evolution. DevOps-inspired methods for deployment, testing, continuous integration and monitoring feedback analysis will be used to accelerate the incorporation of quality in data-intensive cloud application both in public and private deployments, enhancing the capability of small and medium European ISVs to enter the Big Data market.