I encountered this issue using Jenkins 2.150.3, Accurev plugin 0.7.20, and Ant plugin 1.9.  The issue traced back in my case to RunWithSCM.super.getCulprits returning null when it shouldn't be able to.  I was able to roll back to 0.7.13 of the Accurev plugin and the issue went away.

Hello,

I am running into this problem pretty regularly.  I am using AccuRev plugin 0.7.22 and have been fixing it by rolling back the AccuRev plugin to 0.7.13 and then back to 0.7.22.  It seems to start happening when we edit the view tab for only one of our view/tab of projects.  We have some post-build steps set up, but either it errors out in MailSender (see output1), or if I remove the post build Email Notification step I get a shorter stack (see output2).  Any idea if the problem can be fixed anytime soon?

output1:

build status is: 0
[TextFinder plugin] Scanning console output...
[TextFinder plugin] Finished looking for pattern 'EXIT OCCURRED WITH WARNINGS!' in the console output
RTP: Started!
RTP: Done!
[description- setter] Description set: CI:selected, anonymous
ERROR: Build step failed with exception
java.lang.NullPointerException
at hudson.tasks.MailSender.getUserEmailList(MailSender.java:458)
at hudson.tasks.MailSender.createEmptyMail(MailSender.java:389)
at hudson.tasks.MailSender.createBackToNormalMail(MailSender.java:204)
at hudson.tasks.MailSender.createMail(MailSender.java:195)
at hudson.tasks.MailSender.run(MailSender.java:112)
at hudson.tasks.Mailer.perform(Mailer.java:173)
at hudson.tasks.Mailer.perform(Mailer.java:136)
at hudson.tasks.BuildStepMonitor$1.perform(BuildStepMonitor.java:20)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.perform(AbstractBuild.java:741)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.performAllBuildSteps(AbstractBuild.java:690)
at hudson.model.Build$BuildExecution.post2(Build.java:186)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.post(AbstractBuild.java:635)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1843)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:97)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:429)
Build step 'E- mail Notification' marked build as failure
FATAL: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.post(AbstractBuild.java:640)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1843)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:97)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:429)
Notifying upstream projects of job completion
Finished: FAILURE

Output 2 (without post build mail step configured):
FATAL: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.post(AbstractBuild.java:640)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1843)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:97)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:429)
Notifying upstream projects of job completion
Finished: FAILURE

I'm also seeing this. In my particular case, we had a new member join our team and she had never logged in to Jenkins CI yet, but did promote changes in AccuRev using her own account.
This meant that the user was not yet known in Jenkins CI, so I figured this might be related.
I've just asked her to log in to Jenkins CI ones and I'm rerunning the build that failed with this NPE now. Let's hope it succeeds this time. Perhaps that might give some useful information about the root cause.

Update: After she's logged in and the user with the same name existed, I'm not getting this exception anymore.

As mentioned in my comment on GitHub, I think this might be caused by the call to User.getById in AccuRevTransaction::setUser(String author).
The second argument (which indicates if a new user should be created) is set to false. Perhaps it should just be changed to true?

I would like to start my comment by thanking all of you in your contribution to design/development of Jenkins and Jenkins AccuRev plugin and to your contribution to the OpenSource community overall.

In my organization, we have setup multiple Jenkins jobs and most of them integrate with AccuRev plugin to download the code and subsequently build the project. Some of the jobs, especially the ones that run from Linux Servers consistently fail in the last step with the error reported in this JENKINS-56882 ticket. The job does what is expected. Retrieves the code from AccuRev, and performs all the subsequent tasks. However at the very end, it reports failure. We have been ignoring these failed jobs since the jobs accomplish the expected activities.

With this bug, it will be difficult to know whether the job actually failed, or it is showing a failed status due to this bug. This bug will be an hindrance to take this automated process to upper tiers in controlled environments (TEST / PROD) where the IT will not know the correct status of the job, and unable provide adequate & timely support.  

Complete automation is impossible due to this bug as it does not allow for correct exit status tracking. We consider this issue critical and precluding our progress with Jenkins and AccuRev plugin

What is the roadmap to fix this bug ? Your response and attention to fix this issue is much appreciated.

Thanks, Johns

I'm a novice Jenkins user, and have a small shell job setup to use the Accurev plugin to grab code/compile/run a Java Hello World program, redirect the program output to a file and cat the output file to the console.

cd HelloWorldProgram
javac HelloWorld.java
java HelloWorld > outputFile
cat outputFile

After the last operation is performed I see the following in the console output:

+ cd HelloWorldProgram
+ javac HelloWorld.java
+ java HelloWorld
+ cat outputFile
Hello, World
FATAL: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.post(AbstractBuild.java:703)
at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1932)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:97)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:429)
Finished: FAILURE

I note that the top 2 line numbers are slightly different than other user's - I may be running a different version of Jenkins perhaps. Is this > 2 year old problem really not fixed yet?

Environment Variables reveals that JENKINS_VERSION = 2.263.1. 
ACCUREV_VERSION is not visible (ACCUREV_VERSION {ACCUREV_VERSION}).