Confidentiality contract when writing code. Developer questions in SO

Question

I don't know if this is the right place for this questions, but I find that is a proper place because is related with SO.

I work in a company that has a confidentiality contract with the code generated. This is: is not possible to publish the code.

Now, many of the developers of the company use Stack Overflow for support. This implies that little parts of the code would be published.

The clients want us to eliminate the questions with their code. Is not possible to edit the questions to "dissimulate" the code, because the users could see a log of the previous code.

We believe that the chucks of code are not relevant in terms of the whole application.

I'm against deleting the questions because it would damage the reputation of others or creating voids with some relevant questions that could -or not- be useful to other users.

Do you have similar policies in your companies? How do you manage it? What are your suggestions.

Stack Overflow is by FAR better in term of knowledge and experience than any other of my collegues

Answer 1

Ideally part of your debugging process should be to isolate small areas of non-functional code and produce generic test cases to establish what is going wrong. In these instances, posting your test code should be fine as it is intended to demonstrate a problem, and is not going into the application verbatim.

In the past I have tried to avoid posting anything specific that could cause the code to be identified as part of the application, even if that just means renaming variables and functions, and removing comments (or rewriting them to make more sense as an accompaniment to the snippet).