By default, nose will run tests in files or directories under the current working directory whose names include "test" or "Test" at a word boundary (like "test_this" or "functional_test" or "TestClass" but not "libtest"). Test output is similar to that of unittest, but also includes captured stdout output from failing tests, for easy print-style debugging.
These features, and many more, are customizable through the use of plugins. Plugins included with nose provide support for doctest, code coverage, and profiling, flexible attribute-based test selection, output capture and more.