When comparing nose vs ward, the Slant community recommends nose for most people. In the question“What are the best Python unit testing frameworks?” nose is ranked 2nd while ward is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose nose is:
Nose wraps around unittest, adding some more feature and functionality to it, such as SkipTest or auto-discovery.
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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.
Pro Async fixtures
Fixtures can await asynchronous code.
Pro Explicit fixtures
Test fixtures are referenced explicitly, which helps both humans and IDE's understand which fixture is used.
Pro Encourages better test names
Tests are named by markdown strings, not the function name of the test.
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.
Con Not many plugins available (in 2022)
While ward has a plugin system, there are not many plugins available as of 2022. Alternatives, like pytest, have many more plugins to choose from.