The nose.tools module provides a number of testing aids that you may find useful, including decorators for restricting test execution time and testing for exceptions, and all of the same assertX methods found in unittest.TestCase (only spelled in pep08 fashion, so assert_equal rather than assertEqual).
nose.tools provides a few convenience functions to make writing tests easier. You don’t have to use them; nothing in the rest of nose depends on any of these methods.