nose Review

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Review of nose powered by the Slant community.

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What are the best Python unit testing frameworks?

Pros

Pro
Supercedes unittest

Nose wraps around unittest, adding some more feature and functionality to it, such as SkipTest or auto-discovery.

Pro
Minimal boilerplate

Nose tries to keep boilerplate code to a minimum. As such, it's very easy to read and write initial tests.

Pro
Numerous plugins available

There's a large number of plugins available for nose which make unit testing easier. Things like coverage reporting, test selection and xUnit-compatible test output can be added through plugins.

Cons

Con
May be losing support or cease altogether

According to documentation at https://nose.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, nose may become unsupported. There is a successor project called Nose2 (https://github.com/nose-devs/nose2), but it does not support all the features of its predecessor and recommends considering pytest for those new to testing.

Con
Too much reliance on plugins

Having lots of plugins while beneficial, also can be a hindrance. Relying too much on them makes developers feel as if everything's being done by plugins which a lot of times are undocumented or have very little documentation.