Abstract Whenever an emergency occurs, such as a change in the system operating environment that prevents regular functioning, one possibility to restore the system to normal operation is to perform immediately the emergency repair process (ERP). This paper introduces the feature‐based emergency repair process (FbERP), which constitutes a feature‐based improvement/extension to ERP. FbERP uses feature models to represent urgent change requests (UCRs) and traces each change to its location in the code base in order to realign documentation and code. Based on real‐world change requests, we evaluated the proposed process using different techniques, including an empirical case study and a small survey. In the empirical case study, we compare FbERP with respect to ERP to check the effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of the proposed process. The results of the evaluation reveal that FbERP can be successfully used by software engineers to respond to UCRs, with an improvement over ERP.