Context. The appropriate stakeholder selection for software engineering is an essential stage and the precondition of software requirements elicitation. However, the stakeholder analysis hasn’t get enough attention in the requirement elicitation field as it was commonly recognized as a self-evidence process in practice.

Objectives. In this study, we investigated the current status of this area. Collated the affecting factors which influence the appropriate stakeholder selection on Software Engineering (SE) with respect to the requirement elicitation purpose. On the basic of this objective, we investigated a systematic conceptual model which aims to guide the appropriate stakeholder selection of software projects. Finally, we evaluate the meaning to practice of our model.

Methods. We conducted the systematic mapping study for the first objective. The objective of selecting affecting factors is on the basic of the first objective. The objective to evaluate the meaning to practice is realized by interviewing 10 experienced software product managers.

Results. The recent studies on this area have been classified according to their different focuses. We described the methods of each included papers on systematic mapping study. We collected 12 factors used by previous studies and select 6 factors for our model. And we generated our model by six steps. The interview to ten practitioners is used to evaluate our model.

Conclusions. We extracted six factors according to previous studies, then proposed a systematic stakeholder selection model for software projects on the basic of analysis to those factors. Generally, our model’s meaning to practice has been confirmed by interviews with experienced practitioners.