Quantitative Comparison of Dynamic Treemaps for Software Evolution Visualization

Dynamic treemaps are one of the methods of choice for displaying large hierarchies that change over time, such as those encoding the structure of evolving software systems. While quality criteria (and algorithms that optimize for them) are known for static trees, far less has been studied for treemapping dynamic trees. We address this gap by proposing a methodology and associated quality metrics to measure the quality of dynamic treemaps for the specific use-case and context of software evolution visualization. We apply our methodology on a benchmark containing a wide range of real-world software repositories and 12 well-known treemap algorithms. Based on our findings, we discuss the observed advantages and limitations of various treemapping algorithms for visualizing software structure evolution, and propose ways for users to choose the most suitable treemap algorithm based on the targeted criteria of interest.