If you have a paid 4 years to do a research on Software Engineering, what it would be about?

Hello Dev Community,

Your advice/thoughts are needed!

I am about to start a 4 years PhD journey in Software Engineering. A PhD is a long and exhausting journey and I want to make the best out of it, I don't want to spend the coming 4 years working on some hypothetical Software Engineering practices or inventing some fantasy tool that generates or refactors code. I need my PhD to be as much related to the reality as possible and to be in correlation with the software industry.

I think you, the dev community, through your long experience in the field, have come through moments like "I wish I have enough time to research/enhance this thing". Well, here I am, I have the next 4 years to spend researching on a topic related to Software engineering.

I am a developer, who spent some time between academia and industry, so I have been exposed to both worlds, still, a great community of devs like this must have great ideas.

Honestly, I think it will be a great waste of time and effort if a 4 years research in software engineering will not benefit the devs community in some way.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,