With Atlassian having  EOL'ed their self-hosted products, many companies are being forced to migrate to Cloud.

During one such migration, of a large Jira running since 2016, we found Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (JCMA) was failing with these errors: 

2025-09-12 13:48:02.882739867 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-270. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]
2025-09-12 13:48:02.994862120 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-423. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]
2025-09-12 13:48:03.086812126 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-245. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]
2025-09-12 13:48:03.186582919 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-111. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]
2025-09-12 13:48:03.278717969 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-635. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]
2025-09-12 13:48:03.431406011 ERROR ABC project-export We couldn't export Issue ABC-33. Reason: java.lang.NullPointerException: getWatches(...) must not be null. [JCMA 000]

The problem

The problem is that your jiraissue  database table has null values in the watches column. watches  is an integer that stores the number of 'watchers' of an issue.  In Jira instances from 2017 and earlier, jiraissue.watches may be null instead of 0 .

The fix

This is easily fixed with SQL:

update jiraissue set watches=0 where watches is null;