"Invalid use of NULL Value", MySQL and RoR Migrations

Today I was working with a Ruby on Rails application, configured to use MySQL 5.6.10, that kept failing to perform a column-modifying migration:

class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Migration
 def up
   change_column(:some_models, :some_value, :integer, default: 0, null: false)
 end

 def down
 end
end

The error message, from the Mysql12 adapter, was "Invalid use of NULL value".

Using the test database I could change the schema manually, from the MySQL prompt. But I couldn't do so in the development database. As is typical, the test database held no records. That should have been my clue.

Eventually I realized that in the development database the "some_models" table contained many records, at least some of which held NULLs for "some_value".

After performing a manual update:

update some_models set some_value = 0 where some_value is null;

I was able to run the migration.

[Edited 20130822 for typos]