DB schema generated by a migration may look different in rails 4 and 5 (because rails 5 may use different default values). For this reason it's important to explicitly set for which rails version a migration was written for. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35929869/activerecordmigration-deprecation-warning-asks-for-rails-version-but-im-no/35930912#35930912
The procedure for migrating issue assignees is invoked on both an INSERT and UPDATE. This means it will fail for INSERTs because OLD is set to NULL in this case.