Alas, spending time on writing production-ready software is career suicide in academia. Conferences and journals value novelty, and are not interested in incremental improvements.

If you're really lucky (EvoSuite [1] / Google), BigCompany will take interest in your project and give you some money. The expectation is that you'll hire students to improve your software, and then these students will go on to work for BigCompany.

[1] http://www.evosuite.org/evosuite/