The imports part of a file should be handled by the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), not manually by the developer. Unused and useless imports should not occur if that is the case. Leaving them in reduces the code's readability, since their presence can be confusing.

The following code snippet illustrates this rule:

package my.company;

import java.lang.String;        // Non-Compliant - java.lang classes are always implicitly imported
import my.company.SomeClass;    // Non-Compliant - same package files are always implicitly imported
import java.io.File;            // Non-Compliant - File is not used

import my.company2.SomeType;
import my.company2.SomeType;    // Non-Compliant - 'SomeType' is already imported

class ExampleClass {

  public String someString;
  public SomeType something;

}