In Encyclopedia of Software Development Life Cycle Metrics we define a metric as “Software Metric is a measure of anything directly related to software or its production".

What is a dimension?

In a data warehouse, a dimension is a data element that categorizes each item in a data set into non-overlapping regions. A data warehouse dimension provides the means to "slice and dice" data in a data warehouse. Dimensions provide structured labeling information to otherwise unordered numeric measures. For example, "Customer", "Date", and "Product" are all dimensions that could be applied meaningfully to a sales receipt. A dimensional data element is similar to a categorical variable in statistics.

The primary function of dimensions is threefold: to provide filtering, grouping and labeling. For example, in a data warehouse where each person is categorized as having a gender of male, female or unknown, a user of the data warehouse would then be able to filter or categorize each presentation or report by either filtering based on the gender dimension or displaying results broken out by the gender.

Each dimension in a data warehouse may have one or more hierarchies applied to it. For the "Date" dimension, there are several possible hierarchies: "Day > Month > Year", "Day > Week > Year", "Day > Month > Quarter > Year", etc.